Youth Breakers
by Janessky
Summary: Jean's life hadn't been ideal; since ideal for Jean equated to living in a glass room in the night sky, fitted with a lamp, a sketchbook, and a load of comfy shit. It didn't take a childhood in foster care to teach him idealism had no place in life. But going back to a home as a man-child and stumbling around a cute care worker taught him that he maybe didn't have so much to prove.
1. Waste of Paint

**Full Summary:**

 **Jean's life hadn't been ideal so far. Then again, ideal for Jean equated to living in a glass room in the night sky, fitted with a lamp, a sketchbook, and a load of comfy shit. People were frightening, responsibilities were terrifying. Ideally, he'd be as positive as Connie and Sasha or as uncaring as Hitch. He'd have their ability to push on with the worst dragging him down.**

 **But life wasn't supposed to be ideal, and there had been definite barriers between the elements of Jean's for years for a reason. But all reasoning didn't have any choice but to fall and fall hard when Jean found himself back at his roots, at a foster home, kitted with the cutest trainee care worker tragically possible and nuisances in the form of human children. Jean's blushing face always found a way to grow redder; thus was his evolution.**

Additional Mentions: #jeanmarco #springles #yumikuri #mikehan #slow build #foster care #social anxiety #every character is here #at least half of them are queer

A/N: This story will freely discuss and describe symptoms and triggers of anxiety through Jean, so if you are easily triggered please proceed with caution. Otherwise, look forward to lots of idiocy, fluff and gay.

* * *

It feels like your mother  
Has gone to set you free  
You're loving every minute  
It's chemical, a pesticide, a cannonball  
You're lost in time.  
\- _Peace, 'Waste of Paint'_

* * *

The blond strands between Jean's fingers were slick. If they'd been coarser he could maybe've pretended they were threads pulling each digit taut into a fist on his head, trapping them away from the canvas, convincing them out of their shakes. Most of all his hand was there to knock on any doors in his skull – see if the neighbours fancied waking up and bringing a little inspiration to the board room. But he was just sweaty. And the canvas was staying blank.

At this slow recognition, Jean wiped his hands on his jeans. He idly recalled that time one of the house kids insisted to the others that his name was denim in French. Then he went back to idly dropping paint tubes into plastic drawers, feeling a little more exasperated than he did before. At this point it was just a matter of testing his idle limits: How many lazy twitches called for a coffee? How long could he stand tidying simply for sake of keeping his hands busy? How little could he bear his pupils to shrink from compulsively staring at the glowing white of the – _bare_ , very bare – canvas? How gross could he leave his scowl to morph, dwelling on the French fuckups of the old house? How many questions could he ask before he was standing still and blank and sweaty again?

Apparently five. Not his best effort.

His fidgeting fingers tapped the flat shape of his student card through his pocket, and not a moment later, typically, his phone vibrated loudly against its plastic. He opened the text from "Mr Potato Head":

 _Coffee w fam?_

Phone shoved back in his pocket, Jean's fingers travelled to his face, found the sleeve at his wrist, used it to wipe down every plane of heat-irritated skin, pushed his glasses back up the oil slide of his nose. He never trusted himself to multitask. So he prescribed himself mono-tasks. Because a parent with a baby wouldn't teach walking step by step, but foot-lifting by foot-forwarding to foot-landing. And even babies had confidence and determination beyond Jean's capacities. Baby Jean lifted bag. Baby Jean dumped sweaty jumper. Baby Jean checked he had enough change for the bloody coffee in the first place. Then, there, and only there, by the stairwell door, did baby Jean stop calling himself baby Jean.

Outside the art building students were lounging, some sketching, more pissing about. Whenever the sun came out in the city, people leaving buildings got caught up in a cosy trance and felt the need to flop and roll on the grass, squinting up like cats baking in the light of the living room window. Cats were daft and people were daft, so the correlation made sense. Jean couldn't entirely blame the pasty bodies for leaving themselves to tinge pink, bare on the grass with mums grimacing at them across the road from the ASDA car park. The weather made him feel, as Hitch always said, like he was living in Satan's arsehole. She tended to carry statements like that with more grace though, of course. Usually a snort, or five.

She'd been great to him since they started at the school. At first he'd thought the greeting "dork" had been a little uncalled for, but he'd now learned to accept the quirks and the farts and pretend they're endearing. She lived closer to the art building than he did – in the high-ish rise with the dripping black stains creeping down the old paint job. She was also right next to the only Chinese this side of high street. Throw in a mention of obnoxious confidence, and there you had many of the things Jean envied Miss Hitch Dreyse for.

He tilted his head upon passing her building, but not even his chunky lenses could allow sight of any cigarette smoke by her balcony from the pavement.

For a moment, over-thinking his steps past the Chinese, he was reminded of Rom-Coms. Any book, any movie, you could tell when a character was smitten just by the look on their face around the person, their comfort, the light that made their eyes the most lifelike pair in the picture when they thought of them. You could tell especially by the beads flying off the rods on the abacus counting the amount of times the other person slipped into their thoughts. It was honestly scary how often Jean had to remind himself he was not in love with Hitch on any romantic level. She was familiar. She was a link in the map of his brain, from the art building, to her balcony, to the nights spent sat on her takeout-stained carpet eating more takeout, watching one star movies. Hitch had popped up and spread everywhere, so abruptly, and so quickly for someone he'd only had in his life for three years. She was kind of like cancer, but not so bad.

It also didn't help that Jean had an odd habit of looking at unrelated things and comparing them objectively. Thinking on the world that way left opposites appearing the same, making false links, planting false hopes, tying excuses together to make mistakes seem okay. But in no universe did Jean have any "Rom" or any "Com" in his life. Just sardonic appreciation and Hitch's farts mixing with paint fumes.

This tended to be the point at which Jean reached another of his limits. Two blocks from the main campus, at the traffic lights with the green man missing his head. It was always such a hopeful symbol for when he made the soggy walk on a Monday morning. Today was Thursday and lunch was well past, but the feeling was the same. The next corner, on the high street, was where Jean's veins immediately started begging for caffeine. It was the burn that came with an empty mind – an itch for the energy to cheat his way through the day, through the crowds – to pretend he was more personable, even with himself, and to excuse his shaking hands when he reached for paint, for paper, for a veil to pull over his face. Other faces in the crowded street merged and swept into a mass onslaught Jean could feel pricking and irritating his skin, their judgement crawling into his stomach with staring eyes and clawing eyelashes. A podium always stood where his feet walked, he felt.

He was being an idiot, obviously. But, obviously, it wasn't something Jean could help much.

By the time he reached the Waterstone's opposite the university, he'd thankfully forgotten to breathe consciously or lift and place his feet under watch. The swirling crowd had been left behind glass doors and now there was just the rich smell of new books and coffee beans. Voices were quiet for the most part. However, even from the entrance door, the boisterous tones his ears twitched to were aisles of shelves and around an open wall he found a shit-eating grin and a cookie-eating pout, which was quick to burst.

'It's Jeanbo!' Sasha squealed, cookie chunks falling to the table.

Sighing, Jean pulled a chair out at said table. 'Can't tell you guys anything.'

Connie raised his hands, at first in surrender, but then to manually lift Jean's pale limbs and take a hi-five.

Shaking and tightening her ponytail, Sasha cried, 'don't be like that, Jeanbo. The name's adorable.'

(Jean recalled walking monologues on "endearment", but couldn't quite align his childhood pet-name with Hitch's farts in any context.)

'Live and let live.' Connie waggled his finger at Jean before licking the chocolate off it. Then he took his napkin to the corners of his mouth with perfectly sarcastic eloquence. 'We'll banish you once we're done with the name,' he added with a wince, 'and it has already lasted quite a long time...'

There tended to be very few words of Connie's which Jean elected to acknowledge when it came to bullshitted sayings and irony. 'I'm already pretty well banished, considering the art campus is on the other side of the fucking country.'

Connie smirked. 'That'd explain why your head's got a little sweat-shine going on.'

Jean self-consciously ran the back of his hand across his forehead as he stood from his seat. 'Well, yours is shiny from bald,' he quipped.

The queue by the counter was only three bodies long. He could feel the blood quake in his jugular, along with his voice when he ordered, and his hands felt cold and limp when he handed over the money. Unfortunately, he didn't escape the leg bounce when he was left to wait for his coffee by the high table. It sprung on him and continued to spring incessantly as he tried not to stare at anything for too long. Settling on the tray bombed like a battlefield with Sasha's crumbs and napkins, Jean managed to think mostly empty thoughts, and he barely heard his name being called over the white noise of another of Connie's "bald by choice" rants.

Of course, he immediately felt awkward and beyond irritated when he reached out for the cup labelled _John_ , but he used the emotion to distract him from over-thinking and spilling as he traipsed back over to the table he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to sit at. He immediately regretted lifting his hand once he saw it quiver, but Jean felt to awkward to let it fall again; he peeled the plastic lid from his cup and watched the steam cling to his fingers as they withdrew. Thankfully when he looked up the clowns across from him hadn't caught sight of his trembles. Connie was too busy babbling about some movie with the Rock in it, and Sasha was preoccupied with staring at Jean's black coffee as though it were alien placenta.

'We've got to watch Hercules –' Connie's eyes bulged out from their lids and his hand whirled in wild gestures to a very disinterested Jean. 'He got so big for the role his head merged into his neck!'

'I'm pretty sure Dwayne Johnson's chin didn't deflate,' Jean grumbled. 'There's kind of a bit of bone there. Maybe a skull.'

'And he wears a leather nappy,' Connie continued, grin inerasable.

'Probably a loincloth.'

'And he has this hefty handlebar moustache!'

'Ah, yes. My favourite of the Ancient Greek fashions.'

Hands-first, Connie sprang forward. 'Will you come see it?'

Jean blinked. 'No.'

Connie's hands squeaked grotesquely across the wood of the table as they slid with him, back into his seat.

Cookie crumbs all hoovered up into the void, Sasha pouted, 'but you'll at least come over, right? We always do movie night.'

Jean blinked again. 'No, you two always do movie night.'

'Exactly,' both Connie and Sasha countered in synchronisation, like the twins from The Shining, only goofier and incestuous.

A garbled noise emitted from Jean's throat. 'Of course, I'm not part of "we". That's what I get for hanging around with couples – don't hi-five that,' he added in vain.

After clapping Connie's, Sasha's warm fingers reached over and squished Jean's cheeks. Her breath fanned his face and steamed up his glasses. 'You're too cute, Jeanbo. And there's going to be someone just perfectly cute for you around the cute corner.'

Even with the dense frames of his glasses pushed up at an awkward angle, Jean could see his own red reflection in her brown eyes. He felt intimidation wriggling underneath the constant aggravation he experienced around the two sat across from him. He eased her off before his leg could start jumping and the blood could pound in his ears; begging him to count his own breaths and heartbeats as though his body and mind could ever be controlled by the shaky, transparent thing he considered his only self.

Outwardly, Jean just scowled at the turn the conversation had taken. That turn being towards him. And towards personal thoughts he'd wondered and dismissed, personally, on his way to the shop. His favourite thing about inner monologues was that they were made to stay internal. After all, if Sasha knew the shit pile something as innocent and annoying as her touching his face could stack in his brain, or his body, or whatever made him what – the way he was... He honestly had no idea how she would react. What he feared most was being told that he was being silly. He already knew that. And it didn't change a thing.

'Jean?'

By the sudden lifting of his head and his vacant blinking, it was probably obvious that he was waking up from something irrelevant.

'Do you want to come over later?' The expectation bursting from Sasha's eyes was daunting enough from this newfound distance. Back in her seat, bouncing a little, she elaborated, 'what we watch will be up to you. It doesn't have to be anything remotely romantic.'

' _Leather nappy_ ,' Connie hissed.

Although he rolled his eyes, Jean was just thankful that at least one person was oblivious to the weirdness he emitted and let cling to his skin, almost like steam, but more like sweat. (It was sweat.) It was that unbalance in intuition between the two of them that made Connie and Sasha so balanced together. It created a dynamic Jean could envy and a pair of friends he could be grateful for. Someone needed to know what was going on in his head to some extent. Maybe that interest was a little selfish. But he had no excuses – not for the tying and unravelling in his stomach, not for the night.

Jean unleashed his lip from under his teeth. 'Sure, I'll come over,' he agreed. A grin lit up across from him, and he added, 'as long as we don't watch Hercules.'

When Connie started vocally counting up every Hugh Grant movie he had in his arsenal, there was a moment in which Jean grew a little less grateful for the cackling attraction he'd apparently joined at the book shop. But returning laughingly to his drink he saw a heavy frown in his dark coffee, saw spills and slips and ticking drops in the ripples his breaths caused. He felt burns peel his skin into shivers at the steam that breathed back to him. He remembered a blue office, a red face, crowded space, and daunt burrowing up inside his small body with every footstep he heard brush the carpet, with every drop of brown dripping to his small feet – so he forgot his usual worries, his usual clumsiness. He just slapped the lid back on the cup. He'd drink the coffee; then later he'd be grateful for Connie and Sasha's distractions.

* * *

Jean binned the empty cup on his way up the stairwell, and when he walked through the studio doors two immediate acknowledgements occurred to him. One being, everyone was sat outside their work stations chugging down red liquid; followed by the side note that this kind of reminded Jean of the last supper because of that one heavily bearded guy with the vast collection of plaid and sandals – but then not at all, because Beard Boris wasn't dying and he wasn't Jesus. The second acknowledgement was Hitch's presence. And a third was added when she launched a juice carton at his nipple.

'Dork's back!'

Picking up the battered carton, Jean stalked over to the outer wall of his station, where Hitch sat, on his stool, which was supposed to be by his desk, but wasn't, because she fucking loved endorsing his madness –

'I have been here two seconds, and you've already made my tit numb.' Even as he spoke Jean knew something definitely wasn't right about the way his eyes were squinting. 'What the hell is wrong with you?'

Hitched beamed, 'Oh, this should be fun! Name something and I'll tell you if I've got it.'

Jean unleashed some of the chemical nonsense from his system in a deep groan, dragging a hand down his face and forgetting all about the massive goggles he wore. Wiping the lenses on his shirt, he blurted out a guess. 'A grave tendency to be annoying?'

He nearly dropped his glasses when Hitch honked like a game show buzzer and the sound burst through his ear drums.

'The best possible answer was syphilis.' She barked, 'now drink.'

Vision no longer impaired, Jean found the dropped juice carton back in his face. 'Dare I ask why?'

He turned the packaging over in his hands, the smiles on the cartoon berries creeping under one of those doors in his skull and casting grotesque shadows.

'The vendy broke down,' Hitch elaborated between slurps of her own. 'We could only borrow so many coolers from the labs and the Ben and Jerry's took priority. Do it for the cookie dough.'

Jean reluctantly stabbed the straw through the foil of his carton and passed Hitch to sit it on his desk. Leaning against the opening in the walls of his station, he soaked in the sight of heat-stroked students reduced to juice sponges. He prompted, 'aren't usually so many in when the sun's out.'

Hitch's empty carton hit the metal of the bin at the other side of the room. 'We were all out on the grounds, but then Mike awkwardly wandered up to us and asked us to meet him here at four.' A snicker spat past her lips. 'He kinda walks like you.'

'Oh do go on,' Jean grumbled, swiftly rolling back around the wall, into his work station. He didn't have to hear her movements or breathy chuckles to know Hitch was lumbering behind him with a great grin on her face. He didn't need to be stuck facing it to be aware of the giant fucking blank canvas he'd left behind earlier, to get coffee. The coffee which had tasted of blue and red the entire walk back to campus.

Out the corner of his eye, Jean saw Hitch bouncing from foot to foot with her shoulders hunched, and out the other corner he saw his paints in their drawers. He decided to ignore one and lunge for the other, but before his mind could quite decide which deserved which reaction, a low, slow voice called out from behind the walls.

Jean breathed finally when Hitch walked like her lazy self, out into open space. His breath fined out as he was met with space closed with bodies. He stuck by his station, Hitch leaning beside him, glancing at his clenched face.

In the centre of the circle, Mike scratched the stubble he hadn't had the self-awareness to shave that morning. 'If that's everyone here, I'm just going to get right down to it. "It's" just a memo, really – one you've all been ignoring,' the painter and tutor raised his eyebrows in the way that suggested his eyes would just fall closed into sleep if he didn't.

A sigh puffed out of Jean's nose at mention of the notice board, piled out as ever, and neglected sorely. He could feel Hitch nudging his side, and he knew that this was probably going to be about the post on the board he wanted to ignore most. Everything was fine in Fine Art until Jean Kirstein slacked off.

In reply, he elbowed her back – harder.

Mike continued, 'You all are aware of the optional blocks in the FA courses – One of those blocks being one which allows you to go out and get some folio-assisting experience, yes?'

There were grumbles of affirmation here and there. They served as a well-synced soundtrack in the second it took for Jean's eyes roll up somewhere between his brow and the ceiling.

'There's the work experience where you spend time with a freelance or elsewhere employed artist, designer or photographer. In this case you would learn as an intern. And then you have international blocks, which can be longer depending on where you are placed.' Mike's head lolled around as he spoke, and his hands lolled forward in his usual, tidal gestures. 'There are also volunteering blocks, which can be local. Or you can find yourself with some of the other students from our sister campus in Thailand at construction sites for youth shelters.'

Some students volunteered themselves to nod along dumbly so the whole body didn't look entirely dead.

Mike was familiar with this strategy, so the next sweep of his hand through his hair woke him up a little for the slog: 'You have some really great options here-'

Jean wouldn't deny that.

'-And it would be especially helpful for those of you who are just lounging around, drinking shit tons of _BerryBerries_ because all your work is blank.'

Jean couldn't deny that. Even Hitch stopped drinking from the straw in her pocket.

'You are all aware of how this relates to each of you – you've heard it all, read it all-'

Jean should probably have denied the fact that Mike's voice had always reminded him of pebbles running down a washboard.

'-But the only thing that's different now is that this block is no longer optional.' Mike's lips pressed together as hisses broke out amongst the students. His voice then sped up to a rate Jean would have called "normal" if he wasn't too busy internally screaming. 'So, come to any of the tutors for references and ideas, and fill in forms at admin accordingly. The blocks will be month-long projects and will contribute to how your final folio is marked. There needs to be a clear alignment between the work you produce now, and the work at the end of the year. You need to show how your experience influences your Enquiry. If you're staying national, or you are exclusively arranging your own international placement, you must have a place organised by the end of the month. International – you have to have signed up by then, and payments will be sorted October-November. National projects – you need to have done your month's experience by the end of term, before Christmas.' Mike's arms swung to the right, and his voice receded to a grumble as he added, 'any further specifics are on the updated notice.'

At this point all chatter had evaporated from the air and settled in Jean's gut. His veins tugged away from the building, his leg rattled, but his face just frowned and stared as Mike clapped his hands and turned to the door. He knew by now, that was a full stop or a partially sarcastic "good luck" in the language of lumbering trees.

He really hoped he didn't walk like that.

* * *

In the sky there was a layer of shit spiralled out across the city like the ruffled fallout of smoke from a space launch. Of course, it wasn't created at the cost of any marvel – any monkeys sent up and beyond; just the throw up of factories and cars. Jean knew of the dense load's existence, gawking up from the bus window. But through the scratches and smudges of the glass, the wall which met him in the sky couldn't be described as something so dense and gross. It was the lights. The pollution caused by the stale glow of the very lights that allowed city-walkers to see their dreading steps prevented sight of the world which stood by in transience; there to prove nothing and simply be, but proving to be comforting and extraordinary all the same.

Stars. Jean thought about stars. The sky was masked into a blank canvas, light and fuzzy and varying from purple, to green, to yellow. It was a bruise on the ankles of a kid who could never touch his toes. Or a petrol leak, pooled and tracked on the road beside a car that'd glugged its last fuel on the way to the station. There was no way to see the pollution, for those who ditched environmental science documentaries for Take Me Out. There was no way to see the stars. There was just a fuzzy, still wall. And city walls were always a stained waste of paint.

M83 mumbled in Jean's ears. He supposed he was just looking for something that would make the journey seem worthwhile or wistful, like something you'd expect from an underground short film. He'd expected something dark, speckled with blinking lights, something never-ending. When his eyes hit the ceiling the music sounded too sombre.

He decided he hated bus journeys. It wasn't first time he'd decided it. Jean just liked to frequently remind himself of rant material. Anger kept his brain turning over things he would've considered monotonous had he not been blindsided. Supposedly, it was like he was reliving that night with Hitch, on her carpet, with the bottle of limonchello her aunt had brought back from Italy. The neon substance hadn't so much tasted of lemon as it had petrol and brash city lights, but at the time no one had much cause to think of anything other than the fire blazing down their throat. Jean liked bitter tastes on his mind.

Yet, on this bus there wasn't Hitch. No Sasha, no Connie. And before the question of missing comfort could even come into play, there were no distractions beyond rants. Rants didn't evoke change – the people around him weren't moving, were barely breathing, practically comatose after a hot day – but they were still there – the man mirroring his lean against the window in the seat across the aisle, holding a steaming cup of black tea, was still there – and Jean's leg, shuddering beyond cause of the bus's movements, knew it. Actions did evoke change. So Jean pulled his bag strap onto his shoulder and shuffled to the bus door at the next stop.

The bus was left behind him. Then the man and his tea and all the other breathing bodies overtook his heavy pacing legs in windowed blurs of light. Their muggy, crowding heat was replaced with the casual warmth of summer evening. Jean filled his lungs and his ears exhaled blood.

Walking under neon signs, the city ceiling was indefinitely green. It was a reminder of something Jean had taken bus rides away from all day. Jean saw past thoughts in reflections and colours – in dark drinks, in frowning faces, in small rooms, in vast crowds, in running feet, in blank canvases. He remembered thinking hateful thoughts. He remembered his childhood rants were never those worthy of burning limonchello, but rather the toxic burn of drinking petrol itself. This wasn't the sort of reminder he could be thankful for.

And still, as he walked away from the bus, the memories from the old house kept up with his pace; in the rattling bus windows he remembered the incessant shake of a baby's rattle, held in a chubby hand on a chubby body, cradled in lithe arms. The couple had stood in the living room doorway with their baby in tow, gazing into the enclosure of kids who feigned subdued, as though their blood had suddenly chased out the dilution of sugar. Jean hadn't a clue why a newly married couple who already had a rattling, drooling chub-sack in their arms, waiting to grow up a disappointment in some way – why were they there? All parents, whether they meant to or claimed to or not, had expectations for the growths called children that they carried around everywhere. So why was this couple looking for another burden, and why in the place where the world stored the little monsters others had already brushed aside? Jean had thought it all, sat away from the other kids, drawing under Mr Dok's desk, listening to the rattling.

Being honest with himself, as he walked past travel agents and supermarkets and newsagents, Jean knew he could have made a better effort. He might have ended up growing up with that couple, with that rattling baby. He might have had a childhood spent booking holidays in that travel agents, or getting afterschool sweets from _Rosa's_ on the corner. Instead he'd hidden with his drawings, regretting the positioning of his skinny legs every time the blunt coloured pencils burst through the paper and stabbed the bobbled carpet.

Sitting in the living room would have meant dealing with that Jaeger kid kicking his shins under the coffee table, pretending to watch TV, riling him up. That Reiner boy, who'd thought his introduction of Jean as "Denim" had been far too funny, would have been reading aloud, really loud. The sweaty kid the others used as a goal post for an entire week when one of the garden poles went missing – he would have been reading to himself, from a different book, at the crafts table, alone. Annie would have been playing the Game Boy she got for her birthday during those two mysterious months she'd been fostered then returned. If Jean had sat in that room while all the others spoke clearly and acted affably, there would have been expectations for him too. Ones he couldn't adhere to.

Bertolt could speak small and sweet about his book; Eren Jaeger, brash as ever, could mimic the explosions from his favourite cartoon; even the Armin kid who did everything in the garden, from homework, to sneakily feeding the birds in the bushes, could say anything he wanted to the couple with clarity, and confidence, and intelligence – and he didn't even live at the foster home, he was just Eren's school friend. Jean had been the French boy with the stutter. All he did was spill things and spell wrong. That couple wasn't seeing his drawings. They weren't getting near him with their expectant smiles and questions.

Back at the studio, the day had already taken its toll on him. Every day took its toll on him in the old house and from the late moment he'd left with a washboard-voiced, deadline-setting foster parent to now, walking past every face in the city night, the judgement he'd thought was going to face away from his back once he grew up – it never left. The feeling of having something impossible to prove, of being infinitely small never left, no matter how low and close the sky seemed from under a neon canopy.

So, after Mike had left the room he'd struggled to say the least. There was no weight on his shoulders. Just eyes on his back, his sides, his own nails scraping up and down his arms, his own blood heavy and scraping down his leg, which just wouldn't _still_. From the outside, he'd awkwardly stood in his work station, staring at a blank canvas while everyone else packed up and left with folders of work, sketchbooks, and more names of mention in their contacts for this new block than those listed in an Editor's Letter in Vogue. Inside his walls, under his skin, Jean's nerves in spasm and unauthorised buildings of thought and memory were constructing and crumbling in second-long bouts.

He'd rearranged all his paints, mind racing and not sticking at stops for too long in fear of dwelling. When he dwelled his lungs couldn't hold breath and his hands couldn't hold anything. His left'd wound up with one paint tube fisted in it. He'd watched the bar of light overhead fold over the silver peeled into view at the old tube's scratched edges. The labelled colour was one he used weirdly often. Objectively the colour was coarse, but it was one of the few things Jean didn't devalue with objective comparison. Mixed tonally it brought an overtly expressive edge to portraiture. But with neutral tones in other work it was soft and honest. The paint was adaptable beyond Jean's habit.

He didn't think about all this then – just slapped the colour on the canvas in a compulsive sort of way he'd never allowed himself before – never felt driven to. It was just now, with pitiful glances up to the phthalocyanine sky, that he came to his queerest realisation since confronting his sexuality. The night sky didn't look so green, but instead hung matt with the dank blue of council house carpet and the very colour he'd left his canvas. As the phthalo green dye seeped from the air through his skin the red of days Jean would rather forget returned to his mind, just as red flooded his ears and vision.

* * *

Six years old  
Staring at my nose in the mirror  
Trying to dip my toes in the mirror  
Thinking, 'Who's that girl?'  
And, 'Does the mirror world go on forever?'  
Calmly you roll  
Sharpening the knives in the attic  
Trying to watch cartoons through the static  
Thinking where am I gonna be  
If I'm ever twenty-three?  
\- _Lianne La Havas_ _, 'Green & Gold'_

* * *

A/N:

Waste of Paint - Peace  
Leeway - We Were Evergreen  
New Slang - The Shins  
As Lucerne / The Low - Los Campesinos!  
Midnight City (Trentemoller Remix) - M83  
Green & Gold - Lianne La Havas  
Stand Inside Your Love - Smashing Pumpkins


	2. Life On Mars?

But the film is a saddening bore  
'Cause I wrote it  
Ten times or more  
It's about to be writ again  
As I ask you to focus on  
Sailors fighting in the dance hall  
\- _David Bowie, 'Life On Mars?'_

* * *

The mill was decrepit and wilting back into the ground, its wooden grain gnarled and shrivelling beyond life and stability, receding to the earth as though it were a plant confiding its last words in transient nature, whispering softly, weak, shrinking alone outwith the city. It was a bit of a shit hole.

The building might as well have been an olive tree, shrivelling by some Ancient Roman ruins. But the stone of the structure remained, just as tourist remains remained; standing stable enough to hold a gift shop. The city view wasn't as enthralling as the view of Pompeii from Mount Vesuvius, but it still filled Jean with some kind of horror. Although that was probably bias influence from his feet, hobbling around in converse, on ragged stone hills higher than the Art and English buildings stacked one atop the other. He wasn't the hiking type. He wasn't the outdoors type. He wasn't even at an age where loitering in the weird chill could be considered remotely appealing.

He considered asking himself why he was there. But the answers were right in front of him, Connie's head batting the moonlight around on its surface like a pinball, Sasha's throwing a tangled ponytail around as she hopped from stone to stone. Jean also would have asked himself how Sasha was able bound on the roots and rocks like she was in a bouncy house, but the answer to that one had been on Sasha's feet and in Jean's line of vision as soon as she'd opened the door to him barely an hour ago. It became apparent that Connie and Sasha had been blessed with a far greater idea for the night than watching Jean roll his eyes at two hour long Hugh Grant epics. They'd heavily contemplated it, clearly. Jean wouldn't have followed them into the outer city wilderness of dodgy plants and glass bottles if they hadn't already had their hiking boots on, or had their hands up, pushing him back out the door. He supposed Connie considered this greater revenge for his bald comments earlier. After over ten years he still never got away with them.

Jean would have consoled himself with the weather factor: "it's lovely warm out tonight"; like every auntie at every BBQ in world history; or, in Jean's case, every care worker trying to distract themselves from the fact that, yes, that was child sick on their trainers and, yes, this was what they did for a living. But it was the slightly sticky sort of warm that Jean's sweaty neck could do without, and whenever a breeze puffed by it racked his body with the reminder: "yes, this is still Britain".

So, really, Jean didn't say anything at all. All his thoughts were drawn in circles, and erased themselves. Null and void. Connie and Sasha made up for his panting silence, and Jean was happy to let them do so.

They started on the final incline in the path, roots and stones worming into and around their shoes. People said nature could be welcoming, but at night it was unnecessarily so; one root never wanted Jean to leave.

He recalled the first time the three of them had come this way, in their first year of high school.

Generally in first year all places and people felt foreign to Jean, just as Jean was foreign to them. That was when it became "cool" for him, being the French boy. All the students ever asked about was his accent, and the teachers, from Languages to Lit, asked about the culture, the country, the _weather_ – "because me and the husband are going on holiday there end of term and we're very curious to hear" – "you say something fancy!" – "like _j'adore_ , my sister has that on her gym top" – "can you chat her up in French?" – "as if! You don't sound French at all, he's probably kidding us on" – "he's too miserable to kid" – "on? Do you have an _on_ button? Do you have a voice? Do you _talk_? Do you" – "even speak English?" – "he's obviously French he's got that snooty, long-face thing going" – "on a trip to France next Summer. Maybe you can give us some phrases to use? The little books never seem to be enough" – "have you? Have you had enough?"

Blinking up, even in the cold light of his phone screen the branches in the trees spidered down red into Jean's vision. Red as the blood on his knees, fallen, after he'd run away from the boys shouting after him, pushing him, kicking him; fallen, the way he felt after every school day when he had to go back to a house where he tried and tried to attain some pathetic superpower; where he hoped to turn invisible.

Turned out the root of someone's being's a novelty. Jean's foreignness grew too familiar, and with his clamped lips and angered scowls he didn't have much else to offer anyone. But he remembered very vividly the yellow hand that had reached down to him in art class that year.

Sasha hadn't ever taken any claim to genius in visual arts, and even at the age of twelve finger painting was the brightest, most colourful idea she could conjure for decorating her class folder, she'd said, just as "the girl who sits next to me". The yellow-painted pads of her fingers and palm didn't reach him all the way. But as the boys across the table began barking, and Eren started on the issue of Jean's head length (because "baguette boy" was really inventive and hurtful), Sasha's paw had swept towards his flinching, red face and halted over his eyes. Jean remembered the smell of chocolate and poster paint settling over his face from her fingers, he remembered an aching, embarrassed feeling, feeling very warm, and he remembered her words:

'He can't see you.'

And while, in his people-fearing manner, he'd only been looking up to offer the mongrels hateful glances anyway, the words had set that unsettled warmth in him – like clay heated and glazed into something solid, something secure. He couldn't see them, not even when she took her hand away and slapped the yellow down on the shitty, thin paper. He just saw her smile as she did so.

Once the bell went that day, Sasha'd accompanied Jean out the building, across the grounds, to where Connie waited at the gates. Connie had felt her warmth immediately too, but more in the objective sense of her having slapped her yellow hands to his face and smooched him right then and there. It's not what happened, as they left school together. It was more a matter of Sasha's fingers splitting in the Star Fleet salute by way of greeting. Yet, the gross, dorky crush was immediately apparent all over the bald kid's face.

In terms of support, Connie'd never had Sasha's intuition. Maths teachers liked to exclaim that they were both incredibly dumb in their own ways, but both "failed tests all the same". Jean would always scowl at this, no matter how deeply he scowled when he looked over his shoulder at the desk behind and found the dynamic duo drawing body parts on each other's jotters, ones which were probably supposed to look like other body parts, but unfortunately lacked any non-abstract distinctions.

Sasha had this weird way of sniffing out people's troubles and putting them to rest without entirely addressing them. In fact, her approach on issues was so obscure Jean had often wondered if she knew she was doing it. But whenever she did it – they were moments of genius, sheer clairvoyance. Jean even remembered envisioning Sasha's ponytail as an antenna of sorts, picking up on emotional responses, analysing just the right thing to say. He'd soon later doodled a cyber-Sasha in his notebook.

Connie had his own genius. This was apparent from the first morning he awoke as the new kid at the foster home. He had the paper boy's schedule down to the second. He could be the first to follow the weird cartoons, first to fill the crossword up with the right words, wrong spelling, just the way Dok hated, first to tear out page three and leave cut-outs of topless girls rained over the breakfast table, and he'd still have time to catch the paper boy on his bike on his way back past the house. He'd follow him with a catapult and a tube of _Smarties_ and count how many of the sweets broke when they pinged off his helmet. Though he may not have been the greatest when it came to the cooler emotions, like Jean's shivers and shakes, Connie knew people in the sense of what not only made them tick, but made them implode catastrophically. He could achieve explosion of the greatest rage-filled bombs with the slightest of hands.

Both Connie and Sasha were entirely confident in their status as "people" people. Yet when he was around them Jean didn't feel like he had anything to prove, any equal level to push himself up to; he was the red handprints cooled blue with something cowering and wide-eyed, on the paper right next to the yellow pair, and the mischievous orange of Connie's. Jean had found something as a teenager that he could never have predicted as a kid, having spent primary school with Connie's arms hooked under his, holding him back from Eren, kicking, breathing heavy and _red_. Now, however, they were entirely predictable.

Jean knew every step through the rundown gift shop. He knew the faded postcards in the rack, the dusty landscape of the counters, the cookie-cutter shapes in the dust where ornaments in the display case had been nicked through the skin-cutter glass by greedy, laughter-filled hands. He knew the jars on the shelves, the mould in the jars, the bacteria in the mould. He knew the moss on the far wall, the smell of damp, fouler in the heat than the cool. He most definitely knew the stairwell through the narrow door at the back. And he knew Connie was going to tug the door out of the space before his arms had even left his sides. He sat it against the wall, where panelled tracks in the grey fluff and dirt on the floor had already been formed from previous ventures. The claustrophobia of climbing the stairs was the same, but the creak of them was far worse than Jean remembered. The place felt forgotten, but wasn't at all. They climbed up past the granary, then another floor, Sasha's bubbly titters close to ears yet loud and light, carrying them up, following them behind. And when they broke from the narrow stairwell, the first thing Jean saw was the sky.

The sky was the first thing to brace him their first time up those stairs. They'd been dragged along by Eren and Armin in some typical dare scenario. The uncertain pinch between Armin's eyebrows had reflected Jean's own feelings exactly upon meeting the tall, rickety attraction. The only reason they were there was because Eren had a lot of energy, and the majority of it tended to apply itself to stubbornness and a vile smirk which probably endeared others but filled Jean's face with the feeling of nails scraping through flesh. He never knew what it was about Jaeger that wound him up so much. They butted heads once when Jean was first enrolled into the foster system, and their heads never stopped cracking off one another, no matter how much damage it caused them both. It was a battle of the stubborn boiled eggs, war of the scowls.

Jean had to be the first to go upstairs, of course. If he'd challenged Eren to take his place he would have appeared weak, he would have cracked. The place hadn't been so dusty then. It'd been just long enough since the mill had been closed as a tourist attraction for the council to stop caring for it altogether, which had been long enough for multiple breakages to add character in half-hearted lootings, and it'd been long enough since then for the police to stop searching around for underage drinkers.

They weren't there to add to the dragon bed of bottles out on the rocks and dry grass. Jean just had to climb up some stairs.

He'd been thankful for the confidence anger gave him. He could bite back the quakes of winter cold, of all dark and dank, of spiders watching from corners, or the ones he wasn't entirely sure he'd thought up, dangling down to meet his slick neck. He'd stilled himself and climbed the wonky Jenga tower with marching steps which, upon rethinking, probably weren't wise. And, for once, Jean completely forgot to taunt Eren's green eyes shrouded in the stairwell. He was too busy looking up through the broken roof.

Even now the sky and city stood alert, facing one another as Jean peered out from between rafters, bricks, and blades. The wooden beams framed the sight he'd hoped for upon leaving the studio. The murky city ceiling had crystallised and steeled and it reached out to him from this new height as a mirror reflecting the stars above with the lights below. The buildings reached up, and the lights in the sky infinitely distanced themselves with no limit to their climb. It made Jean feel small, but in a way his twiddling, limited hands could appreciate.

He did not appreciate the hot breath on his neck.

'You've got to be kidding me!' Jean flinched away from the eerie sensation and away from the gaps in the front wall. They looked ready to vacuum him up into the sky.

Sasha's hands flapped a little as she tried not to look too pleased with herself. 'Sorry, you were having a moment. I couldn't resist,' she excused, biting her fist and then toddling back to the centre of the dusty, wooden floor.

Connie sat in his usual place there, back to one of the millstones, a newspaper in his hands.

Murmuring to himself, he flicked through the pages, carbon on his fingertips, and gave a satisfied, 'ay,' when he reached gridded pages. Jean wandered over to the two nattering on the floor just as Connie started spreading out sheets like a twister mat.

Jean sighed, 'Well this seems entirely unnecessary.'

Connie was quick to snap and point fingers: 'This is entirely necessary.' Jean could only nod at his wide eyes. 'This is as close as we get to Stark technology. No transparent touch screens, projections – none of that weird shit. Just this week's Guardian. A lot of waffle, and,' the broken glow of the moon shifted on his head as he squinted down at one of the pages, 'adverts for Fairy Liquid.'

'Wow,' Jean smiled. Even in sarcasm, it destroyed his face.

Sasha pulled her phone from Connie's pocket and turned its flash on, scoping out the map below. Jean watched her circle around like a helicopter while Connie declared they "begin" and started listing company names.

'Roy's Plumbing and Engineering Services, Ailman's DIY, T.I Insurance – oh,' Connie gasped. 'They want me to be a phone representative.'

'There is no way you're being given phone numbers for everyone in the city,' Jean refused, closing his eyes tight, with Sasha's light on his face.

Connie pulled a pen from his bottomless jean pocket. He whispered, 'so much power.'

'Not a chance.' Jean batted his hands around and tugged the page away before any damage could be done, but with his lack of sight he wasn't entirely successful. There was a definite tearing sound. Then he felt the tickle of paper and heard Connie snicker.

When his eyelids faded from luminous orange to a rusty red he opened them to sight of Connie circling the job ad on his remaining corner of the page.

Through her grin, Sasha dismissed, 'he's not going to need it anyway.'

'I wouldn't be surprised if he took the apprenticeship and the job,' Jean countered, with a tone of dread he didn't entirely feel.

Sasha's giggles were cut off by a sharp _shush_.

'We're not saying the "A" word, remember.' Connie's eyes scoured the other job ads. Jean could see the glowing text decoding behind his eyes, and the frantic speed of it was familiar, yet scarily unfamiliar in Connie.

'What's making you feel so weird about it?'

Jean regretted the words even as he said them. Not because of Connie's reaction, which was to simply shrug and continue searching. More because the tight worry in his friend's face was ever present in his own, and that weird feeling followed him always, halting him at turns, keeping him from embracing hope of another step, making the stars appear closer when he looked up, pressing, waiting for something Jean couldn't give. And it wasn't something he could explain without feeling stupid. So he didn't know why he asked it of someone else. It just felt right to be actively interested – or nosy, even – He should have asked about the interview earlier. In the terms and conditions for friendship, being annoying was apparently a recurring factor, whether you're attentive or not.

When the stars began to blur into lines of pale, pale, crystalline colours, Jean's eyelids evaporated staring thoughts. He felt like time had lapsed when he blinked around the silvery mill. Sasha was split into five points, gawking up through the roof at her brethren above and Connie was speaking.

'– it just didn't sit right with me.' Connie's voice was low and his eyes on Jean were dark and contemplative. Direct eye contact. Jean wished he wasn't so self involved. 'I wasn't focussed on saying all the things we're told companies are looking for. Words barfed out my mouth, and I know they were fine, but... not as fine as they could have been.'

For a second Connie's frown drooped as low as Jean could feel his own. Then his thumb took to picking at his lip and he started reshuffling pages. 'The handshake,' he added, 'the way they looked at me on the way out. I can't feel sure about it.'

Connie could probably feel Sasha's wondering eyes on him, as he focussed on skimming the page in front of him.

Jean wasn't entirely sure of what to say. He thought Connie was brilliant – had every quality the stars, the world, asked of anybody and everybody and never actually got from Jean himself. Even as he felt concerned eyes on him, he didn't fidget or waver, just focused. He pushed on; bringing the paper out here; bringing Jean and Sasha out here after a few long months of settling into a new year of courses; bringing his true self out every day, and letting him say what he needed to say even in these moments which felt so fragile in their intensity, full of potential for awkward wrong answers. Connie's eyes looked up, light. He smiled. His leg didn't shake.

It only took one upturned quirk of Jean's mouth in return to have him wondering when he's going to stop feeling sorry for himself.

He pulled the nearest unmarked sheet towards his legs. 'It'll be a weird couple' weeks,' Jean mumbled. 'Then it'll just be.'

Connie sighed as Sasha rolled onto her side and rested her head on his thigh, bent with his legs' crossed sitting. He smiled when she popped the tip of her finger to his nose, then went swiftly back to muttering company names and laughing at weirdly cryptic supermarket vouchers.

The light of Sasha's phone fell over the floor and it created a harsh contrast with the musty dark of the room that never seemed to fade languidly. The light and dark mixed like oil and water and Jean squinted down at the ads in his lap.

Each one his narrowed eyes fell on made them want to roll up into his head with an overwhelming sense of boredom he'd somehow known to carry with him all the way from the age of seven to twenty just for this moment. The world was a mess of grand responses. The stars and the city beyond the remaining beams, hoists and spindles made Jean's chest tight with the type of awe that made a person want to be better. The city, when it's around him, made his chest tight, body slimy in physicality and in its grip on his sensitivity. It scared him, and his weakness scared him, and his inability to keep within reach of the two friends sitting right by him, near the sky, terrified him. Same elements, different reactions, exact same intensity.

And then there were the things which weren't so spectacular, but were put out there with the same grandeur. Like the ad for an "executive travel attendant" with British Railways. That'd be the poor old sausage who had to dodder around the carriages handing tepid drinks to grumpy, dislodged mouths. He remembered the old man he hadn't wanted to stare at too long the first time he'd been on a train. He'd been on his way over from France – a human parcel, delivered by the ghosts of motherly hands he barely remembered, into the withholding arms of people who didn't get to pawn him off as a present for ten tedious years. People could do something as simple as walk and fill others with desire, admiration, trepidation. And people could try to dress up something so simple as the job position of the empty face you buy juice from on a train, and it turned out dull after the reveal.

He hoped Connie didn't get stuck with something like that. He wasn't sure he could guarantee himself that comfort.

'There's a painting commission going!'

When Jean blinked dumbly at her, Sasha's big brown eyes peeled bigger. She pressed, 'some Westside council folk are looking for someone to,' she glanced down and read from the lit page, 'design and paint a mural for the kids' park by Rosa Square.'

Jean found Mike's groggy green eyes in his memory from the tragic debriefing earlier in the day, and just about managed to place them over Sasha's, sympathetic as they left their apartment building after hearing about the new course block. 'That's great,' he conceded, nodded, then threw the newspaper page from his lap in a burst of emotion he refused to call a strop. 'Except something like that wouldn't count as volunteering and it wouldn't be the sort of work experience the board's looking for.'

'Yes, blame the board, Jean,' Connie's tongue clicked behind his cheeky grin. 'Mike would never do this to you.'

'You know what, he wouldn't,' Jean agreed, far too seriously. He remembered Mike's begrudging approach on the subject, and the way he backed out the door as though he hadn't just shoved Jean's worst nightmare in his face – as though he could escape Jean's wrath.

Sasha turned onto her stomach and started reviewing the ads again, casually slipping the torn out mural commission over to Jean's feet. Scoffing a little, he glanced at the grainy photograph of the new wall, rebuilt after a long, loud while of early morning construction a block away from Mike's place. He wished he had time. He could do with the money.

When he found himself staring a little too long, he crumpled the extract and shoved it in his pocket, feeling his key nick his knuckles.

He looked up when Connie heaved a sigh and flapped another sheet to the side. When his eyes found Jean, they took to a mischievous glint.

'Are you sure Mike's not cheating on Professor Zoe with the head of board?'

Jean's hand found the pen from the floor and lobbed it at his silver pinball for a head. He wasn't sure if Connie was being annoyingly loud, or if the settled quiet had given his voice the extra boost, but either way Jean didn't fancy hearing it.

Connie yelped and muttered apologies through a grin that wouldn't just _die_. He sighed again as Sasha started humming something vaguely familiar.

'Seriously though,' he rehashed, 'got any ideas?'

Jean made a discontented noise somewhere between "non" and "none" and flicked his page of useless job ads aside with the others. His eyes flickered from the ceiling-less space above to Sasha's swaying feet, a rising, unsettled feeling returning.

He stared somewhere between the gridded sheen of moonlight on the underside of Sasha's boot and another dimension and muttered, 'Hitch is probably going to her aunt's.'

'The one in Italy?'

Connie's voice sounded a little distant, but Jean forced himself to nod. He must talk about her more than he'd realised.

Jean's eyes started watering from staring. They snapped back to Connie when he slapped his own leg.

Picking up the fallen pen from his lap and circling another job on one of the final two sheets, Connie reassured, 'you'll find something.'

Jean just nodded again. His fingers found the ends of his jumper sleeves, tugged and curled. Then the air suddenly stilled. Sasha had stopped humming and a tear ripped into the belated chill the room tried its hopeless best to protect them from. A soft hand pressed another tear-out ad to his knee. Jean's skin tingled under his jeans. His tangled fingers found the slip for an artist's studio. It was just a regular business advert, nothing mentioned about an open position.

Crawling to her spot and flopping on her back again, Sasha huffed.

The quiet barely had time to sweep overhead before she chirped, 'Remember when we were working on our exam pieces and the class ran out of paints? In fourth year?'

Jean grunted in affirmation, lying back with his head gently meeting the dusty grain. His feet began to tussle with Sasha's.

'You turned into a proper pomp and brought in eggs the next day with all these powder tubs.' Jean could hear the teasing smile in Sasha's voice, and its wavers, when, after some rustling, Connie's feet joined the battle with a strong attack.

'Jesus,' Jean winced when Connie accidentally got him in the shin. 'You know, I do remember, because you called me "oeuf poof" for the rest of the day.'

While Connie giggled like an avid cartoon, Sasha elected to ignore this part of the story.

'No one had any idea what you were doing,' she remembered instead. 'The teacher was looking at you all knowingly, and when you started mixing the colours with yolks and water it went all quiet and you were blushing – you're doing it again now,' Sasha's eyes peered over a glorious double chin at Jean's pink face, and she cackled when he started pushing her feet back, bending her legs to her chest. Her voice strained, 'it was the billionth time you mentioned the name Mike that week. Before, he was just "the art guy". Then suddenly he was your hairy friend who taught you how to _make paint_.'

Connie's giggles were continuous, and almost contagious, at this point. His trainers whipped at the heel of Jean's converse, no doubt leaving mud strips. 'He was like the house's new BFG,' he recalled.

At that, Jean laughed. Mike had been there at the foster home one day, showing them his bizarre expressive artworks and getting them to make a colourful mess on a big sheet in the garden. When he noticed Jean blending blurred faces of red and blue amongst the incoherent splatters, his hand had fallen to his shoulder, and he'd told him to "let go". Then he kept coming back.

'What if the house had hired someone else to do crafts that first time, like one of the other university tutors?'

He wasn't sure why he felt the need to delve craters and doubts in something as sure as solid memory. But when it came to life changing meetings in disguise, there were always going to be questions about how life would have been without them.

Sasha's feet flopped back to the floor. 'You probably would have looked it up and brought in the fucking eggs anyway.'

Jean's laughter caught in his nose. 'Probably.'

The cold light in Jean, curled in his leg and waiting to rock back and forth, doubted the surety of that. If he hadn't seen Mike's branching fingers create something so inherently _cool_ in front of his own nerdy, paint-speckled eyes, he perhaps wouldn't have had the confidence to make his own paints in school after fifteen years of stare-fear. But then he remembered the disgruntled look on Eren's face as Jean had finally found something he could be comfortable doing, something which made all the eyes on him blur into a mass of praise. Watching the colours merge into something new, Jean had felt the disdain flee his mind for a few, pure moments.

When Jean's eyes refocused the stars were once again bright and independent, light lines gone, feet on floor.

Connie's shoes waved around a little longer, then hit the floor with a force probably strong enough to break a few of the dry, wooden boards if repeated. Sasha's breathing fluttered out in laughs as she wacked his side.

Then her voice was clear and sure again: 'Point is, you made everything work for you.'

Jean's cheeks moulded and rose with his lips in a smile fonder than he felt he should have been capable of after a day like today. He made a noise reminiscent of "yeah".

He thought of sketching with Mike, above tables, not under, thought of days spent play-fighting on dodgy rocks outside and the floorboards in this room; of hours lingering at the park because being under a grey sky with wind on his hot face and Connie and Sasha flinging themselves to the clouds on the swings was far better than crawling into bed and closing his eyes, ignoring the nagging dread of homework, the nagging dread of dinner with a group of derisive faces, the nagging dread of being asked to speak aloud the next day. He remembered the first time Hitch wondered into his station at the studio, wearing a feather boa and a fake moustache from a big box of party props found in the cupboard, and she demanded he drew her. Jean got lost in faces in the worst ways, but when his hands recreated them he could see sense in their open eyes, hear clarity in their noise.

'He can't see you.' Under his breath, his mind let the thought go, so quietly it might as well have kept it to itself. But he couldn't deny, felt good to say it.

Some people weren't terrible, some changes neither. He supposed he could volunteer or work somewhere for the stupid month-long block, so long as he could physically create himself a distraction. It just took adjusting. And not thinking about irrelevant phthalo canvases, or wasting time on their making.

Connie sighed into the quiet again.

* * *

Through the window, cars were loud and traffic lights were still beeping incessantly because people thought they would press the button and then walk the weeknight silence of the roads before safety could catch up to them. Jean wouldn't be surprised if most people were drunk. Maybe they too had spent the day frowzy and frustrated.

The text on his laptop screen turned into a mass of fuzz as he blearily read over the duvet pulled up to his nose. He let out an entirely necessary groan, and it caught and unwound in his throat for a good twenty seconds, at least.

When it was over, he opened a new tab and started local studio searches. His head didn't turn when his door clicked and cried open.

'Sorry,' Mike's voice came quiet and drawn-out, and his feet scuffed along the carpet louder than usual.

Jean glanced away from the loading results on the screen and his eyes landed on the floor. He snorted. 'What the hell are those?'

Mike's eyebrows shot up as though he forgot he was wearing fuzzy unicorn slippers. Instead of answering the obvious, he answered the second most obvious, 'Hange's narwhals.'

A laugh scuffled through Jean's teeth when he noticed half the man's feet were hanging off the back of the slippers. When he continued to smirk at the tutor, the man defended, 'they were by the door and my feet were cold.'

'I'm sure your toes are really toasty now,' Jean mocked, with very little venom and even less enthusiasm.

Mike held his hands up, just like he had when he'd retreated the studio in the afternoon. 'I said I was sorry,' his voice cracked when it reached a little too high. 'But if shoe jabs are all I'm getting, I'll take 'em.'

An indignant gargle sounded in Jean's throat. He countered, 'so do you like watching me suffer, or is Erwin being a dick?'

Batting Jean's knee through the quilt, Mike shook his head. 'It was a unanimous decision between the board and all the tutors alike. We're chasing out any lazy stragglers.' His hands clasped on his knees. When he turned to look at Jean's dully nodding head, his brow was furrowed. 'I thought you were stuck for ideas anyway? This'll be good help.'

This time, Jean's eyebrows shot up. 'Well, I did something today,' he murmured. Canvas and carpet and coffee all returned to mind and he swallowed around the bitterness it left, mixing slightly with thoughts of colourful hands, in art classes, in foster home gardens – warm memories they had no business mixing with.

The last thought had him looking at Mike again. 'You can't see it,' he dismissed, as soon as he saw the expectant glow in his foster father's eyes.

'Fair enough,' he withdrew, forehead smoothing out. 'But just because something you create isn't entirely what you would have wanted, that doesn't mean it won't take interest – lead onto better things.'

Jean pressed his lips, remembering times when Mike said similar things, when Jean wasn't happy with his work at school and deadlines were approaching. Just remembering the pressure brought the feeling back to his chest and gut. It was a shame he couldn't rip up old house memories the same as he could old drawings. He was right, of course, but it didn't release the rebuilding pressure. And the flighty, faint thing that resided in Jean was still set on chucking out the canvas anyway.

Mike tapped Jean's leg again as he stood, and shuffled over to the door (Jean definitely walked like that). With his hand on the handle, he paused for a moment, and Jean pretended he couldn't feel concerned eyes on him as he scrolled through the links in his lap.

Voice low, Mike breathed deep, and Jean could imagine the hairs on his chin wafting like long grass in a pasta sauce-scented breeze. 'I'll keep looking,' he assured, and the door slowly closed.

There were no goodnight wishes when it was midnight and you were an art student still living with your artist carer. In the hours of dark, Jean's bedside lamp made the glare in his glasses known as his reflection watched him from the laptop screen – watched him wonder and wade. They were hours when Jean could feel more confident in his ideas, and in the daylight of bed-based weekends Jean often convinced himself it was night, so his sketches could wander free.

This volunteer work search wasn't something he could get creative with. Or something he could find confidence in. Either way, he was going to need to face new people, new places. New stares to fear and new steps to memorise, so his feet wouldn't betray him, make him stumble, fall, walk in a way others would deem strange. For a fleeting moment, he opened a new browser tab, ready to search the school website for information on the Thailand campus. But then he thought of himself struggling at airports, lugging bags with sweaty hands – _disgusting_ – heaving his panting breath onto strangers because he couldn't help that his throat was closing and their stares weren't getting any lighter – struggling with yet another language after years of getting his head around a second.

He didn't close the tab, but he used it to research the work of artists he'd taken note of studio addresses for. Somewhere between then and three in the morning, Jean had found himself in a sleepless, stomach-tightening cycle of thinking about the very things he didn't want to think about, watching Maury videos on YouTube and glancing at his own shadowy reflection in yet another mug of coffee. The city outside was quieter, but Jean was many ceilings away from open sky. Circles kept drawing and erased themselves. Null and void.

* * *

And spaceboy they'll kill me  
Before I'm dead and gone  
And any way you choose me  
It won't be wrong  
And anyway you choose me  
We won't belong  
\- _Smashing Pumpkins, 'Spaceboy'_

* * *

A/N:

Cold Wire - Life In Film  
Mardy Bum - Arctic Monkeys  
Streetlights - The View  
Africa - Toto  
Spaceboy - Smashing Pumpkins  
Life On Mars? - David Bowie  
Nicest Thing - Kate Nash


	3. Hear Them Fear Them

I hear them I fear them all  
Observation has caused too many to fall  
Seemingly positive yet I dread for the worst  
With probability of infinity  
An eye could twitch  
A mind could burst  
I may burst  
I may burst  
\- _The Indecent, 'Hear Them Fear Them'_

* * *

Mouths were gross. Their every purpose was gross. They were a molten, steaming cave of gross, crusts dried and collecting in crevices, at corners, sitting so long and bored they'd formed stones. Teeth were weird, themselves. They're flawless in design, like the upper-class cave dwellers, with their dining etiquette; this one's for meat, this one's for veg, this one's for the aperitifs. But, standing back and shaking his head at the entire human race, Jean had to wonder why the ever-loving fuck people considered teeth pretty. It's like eyes – why were they pretty? Pointless thoughts like these had always tormented him. After all, they were two crunchy goo balls in a skull, just darting around in there, veins spidering all over. What wasn't to question? Yet eyes managed to capture light in the most breathtaking ways, they offered colour, and emotion, and windows to the world for those who were fortunate enough to have them operational. Smiles were attractive, though there was no reason for them to be particularly so. It was just baring teeth, but in a friendlier way. Open-mouth chewers. People who walked down the street and suddenly tugged and wretched all the filth from their throat and spat it on the pavement. Drool. The underside of tongues. For something with such specific design, a lot of the mouth's features were needlessly gross.

Many of the words leaving Hitch's were gross. Jean had no idea why it was necessary for him to hear another story to be filed in the "my cousin's a very confident masturbator" folder, which, he might add, need not have existed in his mind in the first place. But the words were spitting out through and around her pasta salad like that scene in Star Trek where Khan and Kirk had to make it through the debris from one craft to another; only, the debris splattered Jean's face a lot quicker than Hitch's voice reached his unhearing ears. He almost couldn't remember, hand sweeping her kinked fringe down to her eyes on the page, why he was drawing her eating lunch anyway. The "almost" was vital. That was the problem.

It wasn't going anywhere soon, lest he did something about it, but he hadn't glanced at the blue-ish, green-ish, gross-ish canvas against the wall all morning. He could feel it peering over his shoulder. He saw Hitch glance at it a few times. Although, thankfully, Hitch much preferred keeping her eyes on Jean's mildly disgruntled face whenever she got to the nastiest parts of her stories, so no questions had been asked.

'– I mean, it was pretty entertaining, but yeah,' Hitch nodded, teeth clamping around her plastic fork, mayonnaise dressing flooding past her lips, through teeth, lips pulling back in a way that made Jean remember how oddly flexible they were, as though they were made for gurning. She finished, 'that's why I plan on bringing my own toaster to Rico's.'

Jean began sketching around and about the hatch-shaded cloud of Hitch's face in the centre of the page – trying to meet her mouth's shapes with the graphite, catching that little bit of carrot between her front teeth before it was sucked away with a worming tongue. Own mouth pulling slightly as he subconsciously mimicked the expressions he drew, Jean's eyes and head flipped up and down on a constant. He didn't have the self-awareness to query if he looked as frenzied as he felt.

Finally, after a croak, actual words dribbled from Jean's subconscious. 'For only a week's trip, I don't think the costs of having a toaster in the hold would be worthwhile.'

'Who said anything about hold luggage?' Hitch scowled at his bowed head. 'That shit's carryon. Strap it to my tits like a baby harness, lipstick and phone in the bread slots. Presto.'

'So much dignity gone, so few words.'

'Never had-ed any, never needed any,' she chirped.

Jean frowned at her boots, pencil limp between his fingers as Hitch stood from her spot on the floor to bin the empty salad pot along with her fifth empty juice carton of the day.

He kept frowning down at his unfinished scribbles. 'So when do you fly?'

'Next Saturday,' was the gross reply. Jean wished he could pretend she wasn't already organised, like everyone else on his course was. He at least pretended she wasn't walking toward the canvas behind him, singing 'Fly By Night' under her breath.

'This finished?' he heard her ask. His fingers reached for his sketch pencils and he started spiking his work with darker and finer details.

'Not sure,' he swallowed. 'Whereabouts in Italy does your aunt live?'

Jean only glimpsed behind once. Hitch was leaning closer to the mass block of colour on the canvas, hands on her hips.

'The Amalfi Coast,' her voice dragged. 'Lots of harbours plus lots of beaches, equals lots of shirtless people and a happy predatory me.'

Jean's hands became idle, weary of overworking the sketches, ever conscious of Hitch's staring. She was looking at the canvas, but the pressure her eyes caused to build up and press around him could be likened to how Jean felt when he made eye contact with strangers. He shoved himself back into the conversation. 'This is a study trip, right?'

Hitch's oversized, floaty shirt shifted when she shrugged. 'Well, my hours are hardly 24/7,' she conceded, 'gotta find a hobby.' Jean passed his exhale in a sigh when she finally sauntered over to his desk and perched herself on its edge. 'Besides, I'm probably just going to be following her around while she films stuff and shouts at people, make her tea when she's painting, throwing hints at me that she's just a little bit better than me. Meet her crazy "connections", who'll also no doubt think they're better than me.'

Jean's hand stopped drumming the sketch pencil against his active leg. He wasn't sure when he'd started.

'That's good though, for a first week,' he righted. 'At least her work goes along the same lines as yours.' The pencil clicked to the floor and rolled into line with the rest. 'It'll be easy for you to get something from it. Then when you come back you'll have all this new stuff done. You go again. Come back again,' Jean's lips quirked at the corners, 'get more _shit_ done. And I'll just rock back and forth in the corner–'

'Yeah, I know – "at least I have an artist aunt",' Hitch rolled her eyes.

Jean held his hands up, unintentionally firing two pencils across the floor of his work station. 'I'm just saying. You're sorted.' He was overtly aware that one of the pencils had skidded over to a certain blue wall, and its presence throbbed in one temple like a migraine when Hitch's intense eyes, orange and feline, milled over the canvas again. His pulse was tight and loud with every second she stared, every second he feared he would have to explain himself. He could never explain himself. Couldn't even offer explanation for why he feared the damn thing in the first place, or feared his friend.

Next instant, Hitch was smirking at him again. 'I'm gonna go ahead and guess, since you're being such a touchy nugget, you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.'

For some reason, in the words Jean found an easeful moment where he could look over at the canvas, caked, clumped and smeared with green and blue and brown, missing only the staples and coffee stains of the old house's carpet – he looked at the thing, and he didn't feel his heart shoot up into his throat. Instead, his head was filled with an alien emptiness.

'Absolutely no clue,' he agreed.

Some people were so manipulative.

Boris sat over at his desk in his station, glancing back every few minutes to find that Jean was indeed still glaring at him around the edge of his own station wall. An ink pot sat open by his elbow, a Postman Pat mug in front of it. His brush delved into the water and then vanished out of sight, his body masking the world from ever witnessing his work. Jean wished people would just declare their evil outright. The boy had wrong-doings done. You could never trust a bearded man who owned children's TV merch, Jean should have known.

'Is there any particular reason why you're staring beard guy down?'

Jean gave an incoherent hum. Then proceeded to defecate his jeans when hands clamped down on his shoulders.

While his hum rose in pitch and stuttered, Jean was forcefully swivelled around in his chair and rolled back to his desk. He squawked when Hitch tugged his chin up and her pale face loomed over him between swinging reeds of blonde hair.

'You know you have a problem when I'm the one telling you you're losing it,' she intervened.

A cry fled Jean's mouth, like the sound of a cat being squeezed too tight. 'I'm very aware I'm losing it.'

'Good,' Hitch yapped and popped her hand to his cheek. She tilted his head forward again. 'Now instead of being a creepy peeper, you can actually do something about these addresses, while I go sort out costs for my trip with your papa bear.'

'Great.' He could groan and groan, but Hitch calling Mike by his name without any teasing... It was never going to happen. He still made the estranged noises though, assuring his so-called friend felt thoroughly pleased with herself as she left his station.

Jean knew he couldn't procrastinate much longer. His frustration made it easy for him to stare around, to watch people the way he felt others watched him. Punish them in his own pathetic, completely ineffective way. Especially Boris. If it weren't for him, Jean might have had a work experience position already.

That, of course, wasn't entirely fair. After the previous night of research, feeling the rigid calm that came with organisation, Jean had spent the whole of Tuesday staring at the addresses and names he'd selected in their word document, just like he was now. Then he'd trudged into the studios today, and there Boris was, stroking his beard, with his month's placement fixed for the first artist on Jean's list.

The guy's website had been really interesting, lots of collage work – political events of art on massive walls, planks, sculptures. But that one was out of Jean's hands. It felt as though it'd been a warm weight there, one he'd been so proud of holding, so proud of himself for feeling so _almost_ ready, so tangibly ready, to meet the expectations of, shakily shake his hand and offer him his CV. He could have done it. He was going to do it. This morning he was startled and his hands drifted apart, the weight fell through them, seeped through the skin of his stomach, and settled there in cold, stale nervousness. His nerve hit the floor.

So now he stared. Stared at the screen until he could feel the static crackle over his eyes' shiny surface the few times he blinked.

And Friday wasn't much better.

He'd stopped staring at Boris. He, in a flyaway second of wily fancy, dared to print out the address list. Yet, he was still cowering under the blanket notion that he could avoid going out into the city and visiting local studios, that he could avoid people.

Jean's idle desperation had reached a point where he could convince himself that the last carton of BerryBerries, perched on the counter by the broken vending machine, was a metaphor for the work ethic of the students. When there had been more of the boxes, everyone'd milled around, staring at walls, cackling needlessly whenever some genius stuck spare straws up their nose, staring at blank canvases, creating bollocks paintings they don't ever want to see again – at one point the entire studio went silent because, in the heat wave, Thomas had taken off his shirt and everyone marvelled at the moles and freckles sat on his tubby back in the shape of a smiley face. Hitch got four hundred likes for it on Instagram, and now insisted she was the sorry guy's agent.

However, throughout the week the numbers of cartons had been dwindling furiously as Mina passed the counter on her way to and from interviews, Marlo did the same while he photocopied and distributed his CV, Pere used them for fuel while he rolled out a massive sheet of handmade paper and began doing insane ink and typography work, upping the scale from his second year stuff, doing research in preparation for volunteering in Thailand. Even Thomas had reconstructed his portfolio and double-juiced at least twice a day on his way from his work station to the train station, searching outwith the city.

For Jean, it wasn't a case of the productivity of others scaring a procrastinator. The only reason he was still staring at the fucking list came down to his dire want to be confident enough to march out the door with everything and come back with nothing without being completely deflated. Not to mention, it would be helpful if, in the first place, he could confront a stranger, show them his work as though he'd given them a knife and bared his chest, and explain himself to those staring, expectant eyes glazed with the sheen of a blade's tip. He didn't want to think so little of others. He wanted to believe that the artists out in the city, too busy accomplishing in their own circles to know of Jean's pining after them, would be open-minded. He wanted to believe as much as everyone liked to think for themselves, that people didn't judge. He wanted to be able to open his mouth in front of strangers and not emit some unholy sacrificial goat noise. He wanted to show that, while his knowledge of himself wasn't exactly sound, he loved his work. Why it was so easy for others, Jean couldn't tell.

'That is enough.'

Jean's head snapped up and he blinked the crust from his eyes like a car scraping muck from its windscreen. Hitch was leaning against the side of one of his station walls, bag strap over her shoulder, deodorant spraying sharp and cold under her arms.

'Enough staring, I know,' Jean grumbled. The paper in his hands drifted down into the open, bare sketchbook in his lap as his fingers took to his face.

Hitch released an exasperated growl that made Jean jump. He blinked bewilderedly behind the dark sleeves covering his lenses.

'I mean, usually I find great satisfaction in watching you struggle, but this is just _moping_ ,' she stressed. After a pause filled with Jean counting his breaths in the dark, her footsteps thudded and something scraped. His arms fell to the hardback on his thighs and she was standing there by the exit with his A1 folio in one hand and his CV in the other.

For one fleeting moment, Jean's chest clenched with something that wasn't paranoia for the first time this week. Then she started whistling at him like a dog owner at the park. Jean supposed, home was where dogs inevitably had to return to, and the streets and studios were where he didn't want to go, but was supposed to be. The image wasn't entirely inappropriate, but he elected to ignore Hitch's cry of "good boy" when he reached for his bag and picked up the list. Pencils fell to the floor, and the sketchbook waited in his seat.

It was pointless. Ridiculous even.

He'd been everywhere. He'd shook so many hands, and the owner's of which probably regretted it after feeling like they'd just squeezed a wet sponge. With every passing day, passing search, passing fear, overcoming, fear, overcoming, the ridiculousness only exceeded its own standards as Jean gave himself up to the world and everything he felt he couldn't handle to come away with no results. It seemed even more ridiculous to say he felt rejected. Surprised too, that even after twenty years of feeling this way he still hadn't come to terms with it. He'd yet to feel the tight spring coiling in his gut and the heightened pulsing of worry and thought in his mind and just shrug at it. It should have been normal by now. Difficult to understand, irritating beyond belief, but normal.

That was the greatest part of this quiet hour in the evening, when he could do no more for the day, when all official open hours were done, he was done, and Jean could just sit by the window and loathe himself. Loathe himself not because he was unsuccessful. Most of the artists were clearing up after a summer of exhibitions, fixing sales, starting commissions. It wasn't an ideal time for taking on a student, and even then, those who could take him on already had someone from the school. He looked down on himself for feeling defeated, looked down on the cold-stirring part of him that wanted to use the feeling as an excuse not to try anymore.

It was worse when you gave into false faith too soon, to have it taken away; Luke Siss was an artist stationed in Sina known for his abstract cityscapes. He'd been interested in Jean's folio. In the distance, where the sun was setting in murky pastels, Jean could see the same pale colour of hope his eyes had taken when he'd seen the man actually smile, large calloused hands sifting through his sketchbook pages. But he drifted around a lot, Jean could tell as soon as he'd gone onto the artist's website the Monday before – pages and pages of sunsets painted and distorted from the chill and heat of countries each which way. The moment he'd seen the smile, heard his praise, Jean had forgotten that fact. His eyes had reflected dull and brown in the evening beyond the glass door, judging him for how he struggled out the building with his folder, how he dragged himself home after being reminded. Siss couldn't take him on – off to Cairo then, ironically, Thailand, where the others would be. It was too much to organise for a month of being stuck with Jean.

So now he was stuck and staring, and quite frankly getting sick of it after a week of it. The pen in his hand was daring and heavy – because, of course he had his sketchbook out again – and he felt the lines taint the paper's skin. He tattooed silhouettes and their shadows on the pavement. The cemented windows in the old workhouse across the road. In the few minutes he felt his leg calm enough to allow him to sit and think without getting worked up, he sat the pen down and lifted and lowered his glasses over and over, watching cracks appear and blur in stone, stains on the window seat wallpaper brighten then become part of the design, watching shadows fade into walls and concrete, become less rigid, less taunting – watch Hange lean forward on the couch and do the same thing with their glasses in the window, grinning at their own hilarity reflected back at them. That got his attention.

'You alright Genie?'

'Alright enough,' he murmured, only mildly regretting letting Hange call him that the first time they met. It seemed too late to intervene now. Especially after they got him Bowie's Aladdin Sane vinyl for his birthday. He had to appreciate the sentiment, even though in every play-through he had to endure them dancing around Mike to 'Let's Spend the Night Together' before 'Jean Genie' came on.

They bounced up from the couch, Jean holding his breath as he dreaded them shuffling towards him with an eager look on their face. He never dealt with expectations well. In reality, they just stretched and hobbled through to the kitchen after a good hour of flexing their ability to fold up like a deck chair and find comfort in the most bizarre positions.

'Fair dos!' they sang.

Jean felt a twinge of annoyance, knowing he'd surrounded himself with people who were far too perceptive of his sorry feelings. He was thankful that the only thing they nudged was the fridge door, and they gawped inside with the cold light washing out their oval lenses. Jean's fingers padded prints over the open page tilted against his knees and found his pen.

'Chicken tikka... pepperoni pizza... suspiciously old beans... oh, chow mein – chow you doin'?'

Despite himself, Jean smirked at Hange's mumblings. He heard their hip hit the fridge door and the microwave beeping and droning. He started a new page of bricks and window frames, mind humming with their animated background noise. When they started coughing, phlegm-filled and retching, however, Jean turned with a face twisted into something nasty.

There, leaning away from the bin, microwave still going, Hange tipped out the contents of a container caked in bean sauce the colour of stained brick buildings. They spotted his scowl.

'Sorry, were you saving these?'

Jean would have laughed had they not looked entirely, regretfully serious.

He smiled, eyes wide and a little glazed over. 'You know, I'm alright.'

'Fair dos!' they sang, louder, higher.

The light coming in from the window was getting colder as the colour of the sun fled and the sky was left to fend for itself, able only to turn dark and darker blue. The lamppost flickered on below the apartment window, orange light drifting up to the third floor, unable to reach over the chipped frame. It casted a jagged line of shadow past Jean's sketchbook, over his leg. As it continued to flicker, Jean figured those living in the apartment below were probably losing their minds.

It looked like the city was slowly giving up, heart monitor stuttering, breathing ragged as the world took sleep. And sleep didn't sound too bad. But Hange's reactions when they got fully invested in TV shows were always amusing, and tonight was Buffy night.

'Thanks,' Jean muttered as they pulled the lamp toggle beside him on their way back to the couch, steaming bowl of noodles in hand.

'Are you sure you don't want anything to eat?' Even as Jean shook his head, Hange twirled sauce-covered strands around their fork and held them over their hanging tongue in pause. 'We could Lady and the Tramp it, but with forks because we're not heathens.'

Jean couldn't confidently say that two day old takeout would have appealed to him any day. But his stomach lurched for different reasons. He felt full, like his blood had escaped his veins and flooded every part of him, logged him up with an intense restlessness. A pencil took place of his pen.

'I'm fine,' his eyes followed the trails of graphite he swept. 'Promise.'

Hange shrugged, pressing play on the app casted to the TV. 'S'long as you're sure. Promise tomorrow's food won't be slimy, once Mike's back from the shops and we can verify he didn't just get stain remover and scotch tape.'

Jean blew at the dust kicked up by his drawn path, then started back on the light outlines of another sketch, lip clamped between his teeth. 'You say that now,' he estimated a wild guess, 'but tomorrow you'll both get back late and you won't be bothered and "och, it's Friday night, we can treat ourselves".'

An indignant wail got blocked up behind Hange's mouthful of noodles, like a clogged toilet trying to flush. 'I think you'll find with our conjoined efforts we can mix pasta and pesto,' they argued.

'I have every faith in you.' He tried not to think about the time Mike left a dry pot on the hob and Hange added the pasta – neither added water, and proceeded to insist that was Jean's job once the metal had started turning into toxic waste and the pasta turned into metal.

When the theme song started Hange's nasal "guitar voice" possessed them. Jean's mind paced itself in catching up to his hand. He found Hange's features possessing the windows drawn on the page, the ever-present smile at their eyes' corners contradicting the faint line left between their eyebrows from excessive, intensive guitar soloing. Their face was always lit bright with some passion, something inherently expressive. It was the key thing Jean tied them to Sasha with, beyond the brown eyes and brown ponytails. They weren't related, of course. In fact, the only reason Hange was in his life was because of their relationship with Mike, and if it weren't for that stable relationship Jean might not have been in Mike's life at all. Still, the feeling that he was looking at a psychedelic depiction of Sasha in the future, yet varnished with something dark and perfectly, manically plaguing, was too real.

They were probably his favourite person to draw. Not collectively, but in scratches of a face so fiery and estranged it was undeniably _them_. Hitch's entire being slinked. Her face, especially, was catlike in both a careful and feral sense. Her brash expressions, her grins, her smirks, that glint in her eye when she said something acutely horrible with the lightest of teases. That was all best captured in one, sharp portrait. One in which her eyes could hold that pointed blade he felt nick his brow from everyone's faces, but in an endearing way. Everything from Hange's mouth packing itself with old noodles, to their crinkled eye cackles whenever Buffy's early limitations in effects were shown in the best ways. That was all for the vigorous, heavy portrayal he needed this second.

Then Jean stared and it wasn't enough. He wanted to mess his hands, mess up the page like his mind's letters and images were shattering on the surface from his fingertips. His legs swung to the floor from his perch and he felt brief pierces of light over his face, sinking through his skin while he gathered his sketch pencils and pens. When he glanced up, Hange's lips curved benignly. And when they went back to gawking at the screen, he looked down and found a different page open in his lap, with more eyes staring back at him through graphite shadows, all sharp and attentive and not entirely Hitch's in the way he'd wanted to see them, munching maws openly framing them. They were feral in the wrong sense. They watched him close the book, bore through the cover, through his chest.

They reminded him, as he headed through to cover his bedcovers in charcoal smudges, of the kind of attention he'd spent all week seeking and avoiding. They watched him, restless in his mind, as he lay awake and thought of the next day – the new part time job he found in his searches for something more substantial. Turned out no one could work Friday mornings. So Jean got to open shop on his first day, hoping not to spend the whole shift opening his skull on counters and slapping its pieces back in place with Pritt Stick. Of course, holding himself together would take something stronger. Glue was something he actually had.

* * *

Moon rise, thoughtful eyes  
Staring back at me from the window beside  
No fright or hindsight  
Leaving behind that empty feeling inside  
My ship isn't coming and I just can't pretend  
\- _Rush, 'Fly By Night'_

* * *

A/N:

Hear Them Fear Them - The Indecent  
Fly By Night - Rush  
One Off Pretender - The View  
It's A Bullshit - Subconscious (the video for this never fails to make me cry out of happiness)  
Clumsy - Our Lady Peace  
Wide Eyes - Local Natives  
Twice - Little Dragon


	4. Paranoia

Check this pose, yeah I'll try to feel comfortable,  
Like a glass bottle cutting through my eye 1, 2!  
With an eye patch, you can read every gesture,  
When you said good, were you talkin' about my paranoia  
\- The Death Set, 'Paranoia'

* * *

If Jean could tell himself to fuck off he would. Even memories of him were annoying. What kid heard another call him "horse face" and stabbed a pen through the tissue of their calf? Well, the answer would be the same twenty year old kid quaking in his vans under scrutiny of a five year old across the counter.

To be fair, he hadn't intended to hurt Eren like that, or ruin his pen. He would say he didn't know his strength, but his weakness against anger as a child had always been the problem. At that point he didn't really have anyone around, merely people who didn't care, or only cared enough to taunt him once they noticed his short fuse. Though, it made complete sense to him. He was a skinny beast for a boy, whose base reaction to the fear he felt was rage. And whenever he wasn't angry, he didn't make an effort. He made himself one of those background sods, faded into the wall, there to punch holes through when others got pent up in their own issues.

This kid was a different kind of bestial, like Satan swayed in and out of consciousness behind her dark eyes. Her cheeks were rosy with heat and what Jean would have thought was elation at her mother buying her new things, had it not been for her pursed, prune lips. Glancing around, he promised he was trying not to look at her, but it was especially difficult when through the fuzz of Jean's brain he heard the girl's mum speak brightly and trail her closer to him.

Two boxes were placed on the counter, and the woman smiled. 'We'll take these, please.'

Totalling up the prices with his throat closed tight, Jean nodded. 'That's twenty-one ninety-nine,' he read from the screen, eyes flying between the woman's iced own, the smooth notes and coins she held out to him, and the puddles he'd left on the till buttons.

When she left, he said he wouldn't kick himself too hard for any shakes in his limbs as he retrieved the money and tried not to punch himself in the kidneys with the till tray. Still, he couldn't help but tug at his hair a little, hunched over the counter. The upright blond twigs probably shuddered when he straightened up and found his co-worker standing beside him.

Christa's harmless smile took to a twitch as she hefted more _Playmate Slates_ behind the counter. 'Never worked in customer services before?' she asked.

Jean's breath hefted out in one mouth fart. He was tempted to leave his answer there when Christa started giggling, but added, 'I worked in one of the smaller supermarkets over summer, but they weren't so busy and you could hide in the aisles.'

He wished the reality of his hiding wasn't so literal. He remembered between the body care and house care aisles there had been a good spot, lot of boxes.

Christa laughed. 'If you'd like, I can take over the front.' Jean made some hesitant noise and she pressed, 'really, it's fine. After our lunch break, it's usually quite quiet, and that delivery from this morning still needs sorted in the back.'

Her eyes were wide and lovely, and Jean thought he'd love to draw them in intense summer light, leaving dustings of crystalline blue pastel. He just loved being selfish, so it was irrelevant that he was going to tug his hair no matter what work he did. At least at the back he couldn't get weird looks for it.

'Sure, thanks,' he felt the words leave him in a rush of wind as he circled the counter and edged through the shop.

There, he was met with a load of... shit. Boxes and boxes of art supplies dumbed down and remarketed for kids as "crafts". The bitter old man in him scowled as he began uplifting all the "Crazies' Crayons" and perched them on their correlating shelf. In the back room the light was cold and brutal and it reminded him of the art school's end of year exhibition in first year, shivering in the toilets and trying to remember how breathing worked.

Hitch had taken oil pastels and used them like regular crayons, drawing a childish stick figure with two big tits below its head. It was framed, out in the hall, on the wall across from his own works. She'd photographed something similar, formed out of cocktail sticks, grapes and cheese cubes on a Barbie cloth. It was framed beside the first. A lot of her stuff tainted childhood with dirtier, grosser questions. And then there was this perfect, sparkling vase. It was just like your average ceramic found at B&Q. Only, Hitch handcrafted it and the markings of her graceful fingers remained imprinted around the rim, beyond the pink glitter padding the surface all around. Jean could gaze off across the hall, hands sweating, and picture Hitch's own filling the prints, as though she was sat at the pottery wheel right then and there with all the business suits walking past her. She'd actually been involved with various people looking at her art, doing what she was supposed to do. But the thought of her working had been oddly comforting and distracted Jean from the eyes boring through his own canvases.

He perched the glitter shaker sets by the PVA bottles and glue sticks, trying to shake off that thought before it carried any further. His head would twinge and his eyes would sting when his heart throbbed in his throat. The dreaded sensations didn't start but the memory of them made his chest constrict and his gut take flight and he regretted eating lunch when not a single mouthful felt settled.

Pacing mono tasks often helped. It suited his clumsy abilities, it distracted him. From paint pots with crappy plastic brushes to colouring by numbers books, he tidied, and it worked a while. It was only his second day, but he'd wanted to cling onto Christa's every inducting word yesterday when she'd shown him around, instead of focussing on the fact that he was here and not fulltime searching for the placement his course required. So he knew where the homemade card kits went, and the sticker strips of silver numbers, cupcakes, flowers, and the ceramic decorating set.

He pulled his focus to the vintage puzzles, ones featuring old Cadbury's ads, fashion through the eras, or Pinky and Perky dipping their trotters into his body and stealing his soul with dead-staring eyes. They all went by the books, on the emptying display top. Jean swallowed and swallowed at his bile flavoured saliva as he carried the boxes into the shop. Around the corner, he was vaguely aware of voices, and as he breathed deep and uneven, he saw blonde and brown, high bodies and small, between the shelves, by the counter. It wasn't that he couldn't see, more that everything receded into clamour. Least he needed to know was Christa was busy with customers, wooing the families with her expressive, kind wows.

The pieces in the boxes rattled with Jean's frigid hold. He lowered them to the display, not even slightly convincing himself that the stare he felt on the side of his flushed face wasn't really there. Out the corner of his eye and without aid of his lenses the face was blurred, but he would bet the customer had freckles, brown hair and the kind of skin the sun was forever kind to. And a grin to rival Connie's when Jean's leg punted one of the boxes off the unit on his smooth way back to the storage room.

'Cracking job, Milo.'

Jean was embarrassed – it was an understatement and it didn't need saying. Usually when people spurted, "it's the little things", they were referring to the sweet, simple moments in life that made the less ideal ones worthwhile, or everyday shifts of light and smiles on the face of someone they loved. For Jean, "the little things" were the ones that made him reddest. They made him look simpler in the simplest ways. Pitiful.

But even with all the heat and breaths wrapping him up tighter and tighter, Jean turned to the freakishly tall customer who never relented and relented: 'Milo?'

Her grin rotated at a cheeky forty degree angle. 'You look like the nerd from Atlantis,' she clarified. She was fiddling with one of the yoyos from the front counter display – the ones with classic art prints behind the plastic, a Monet – just like she had yesterday during his morning shift and his morning shift today, and for the first ten minutes of staff break – 'Except you have that fluffy blond mop on your head, and a depressing look on your face.'

She'd kindly come back, of course.

'Thank you,' Jean gritted. The clattering box he righted amplified the grit.

'Anytime, Milo.' She cursed as she swung the yoyo down and the string ran away from her.

Jean's shoe halted the rolling toy, and he was only a little smug when he picked it up and towed it over to the counter. He'd say he looked her in the eye while he wound the string in place and sat it back on the display, but he really soaked in the view of her risen, uncaring brows. (His were better kempt, even with his piercing on the left, but he wasn't sure if that was a token of pride.)

'You've got guts, Goggles.'

Jean's jaw clenched and hot air puffed out his nose, over his blushing face. 'Please do keep 'em coming.' In the sweep of old man bitterness, he found the strength to add, 'challenge yourself.'

More air gassed over his cheeks when the girl outright laughed in his face.

'Y'might just be one of my new favourites,' her words heaved and shot like coughs. Then the yoyo was in her hand again, unravelling to his feet, bounding to her short-nailed hand.

He was most positive he didn't want to know what that meant. And he didn't have to know, so long as her visits stopped being as regular as an old lady's to church. Hell, he didn't even need to know her name.

'Ymir, could you help Jean in the back for a bit? I need to ring this lady up.'

Christa had the most angelic eyes and the most innocent face, glowing atop a stack of boxes and kits (merit of her salesmanship), and Jean still very much wanted to draw her. So that he could tarnish her gentle features with the sharp, heavy red of pure evil.

Ymir's impossible three-sixty degree grin was as much as Jean dared remember of his afternoon shift. In the evening, she'd bored of him and his quiet, grumpy acknowledgements, returning to Christa in the shop. It had been only a few minutes before then that he started getting the texts.

 _Hitch a Ride [16:06]_ _  
_the studios were nice and whinefree today you arsehole with a job

 _Hitch a Ride [16:20]_ _  
_walking home alone arsehole with a job

 _Mike [16:54]_  
When does your shift end?

 _Mike [17:07]_ _  
_Could you be home soon please

 _Hitch a Ride [17:08]_ _  
_arsehole

 _Mike [17:10]_ _  
_Doesn't need to be for dinenr. Can grab something on the way home

 _Mike [17:22]_ _  
_Hange's asking for stain remover and scotch tape. Don't know if they're serious or not, they're making that face. Need you home though.

 _Hitch a Ride [17:34]_ _  
_andy warsehol

 _Mike [17:40]_ _  
_Got something to talk about

Mike had trouble with indirect contact. Or rather, Jean took issue with Mike's kind of indirectness. He either came across as half asleep, or on full alert – the ominous, paranoid kind of alert which made Jean's eyeballs flee his skull and his brain cells melt and leak into his blood stream. His heart was the most troubled once he received the latest one. He struggled to get it back down into his chest and his pulse pounded at his body's every focal point.

Jean never had the most coherent mind, or the reliable rep for not _assuming_ things. But when someone was trying to hide parts of themselves from those closest to them, there were quite obvious subjects to assume upon hearing "got something to talk about".

He'd probably seen Jean's canvas. It wasn't like his usual work, it wasn't expressive, it wasn't warm. It was cold and stale – a swatch of a colour excavated from the blur of memories – it wasn't right, and it wasn't fair that Jean had avoided the subject for over a week. He hadn't created a single piece since then. Only sketchbook work. And Mike had been asking about it, over dinner, over the sound of panel show laughter or the humming narrative of documentaries, even over the sound of Hange singing while they marked papers. Their singing tended to get particularly loud whenever Mike asked about Jean's "inspiration", how was this coming along, how was that? In Jean's idle fret he'd latched onto random elements of the room, like the fuzz of the TV, the condensation weeping from his fingerprints on his glass, or Hange's tense-twitching fingers around their red pen. That was another alert.

It wasn't that Mike was emotionally stunted or anything. More that when he woke up his ability to read the room remained sleeping. Hange, on the other hand, could deduct their way through most situations, and in that sense they were probably Mike's ghost whisperer; On Thursday night Hange had been fairly relaxed with him, but Jean mightn't have been enough so to stop them from pouncing on Mike's sleepy slipping shoulders and trying to head butt him into some sort of clueless action. It was probably his stupid fucking leg. Or his stupid shaky hands. Or his inability to breathe just the right depth, at the right pace. Or the two pink prints forever on his cheeks. Something must have given him away.

A jolt resounded up Jean's body from the phone buzzing against his thigh. And again. Three missed calls total.

 _Mike [18:26]_ _  
_Answer your phone or come home or both in some order

Crouched on the floor in the cool, grey back room, the screen beamed blue over him. Left idle, Jean's phone locked and he found his own stupid face staring back at him. Beyond the swaying door, Christa's feathery voice could be heard floating around the shop, and Ymir's grouching followed, and Jean was very aware that he was having a very daft break down in a very dull room and he was very much not alone for the show.

He started to feel silly. But Jean had spent most of the time Mike had been home all week in his room, and he was quick to leave and arrive at lectures and sessions with tutors. He was sure even Mike couldn't believe Jean had eaten before he got home _every day_. He didn't eat at the studios, just glared as Boris took the last of the berry juices. All he had to show for the fact that he was still living was that canvas. All that showed for him were faces and rooms he'd rather just forget, an empty feeling he'd rather forget, a feeling of not being wanted. All those memories did was initiate his symptoms.

Breathing wasn't supposed to be this hard, there wasn't supposed to be technique beyond the basic inhale-exhale. Yet here he was, trying to inhale the world up his nose and out through his mouth; stomach rise, chest rise; no fall, no release. The shelves around him felt close and he wished he could bundle himself together in one of the empty boxes stacked away. There he could pretend he belonged, that he was a weird creature which dwelled in boxes and didn't have any obligations to people, hopes to blow out, no shelves, no stares looming over him, only a darkness in which he could envision the night sky. A space hermit. His only job would be to breathe, in a box. And well, now he had to feel ridiculous, didn't he? He'd basically just wished he was one of the Clangers.

It was September, and the heat was dwindling considerably. Jean was positive he was the one absorbing it. Be it heatstroke, be it anxiety, be it the jumper damp at his neck, he had a problem.

 _Missed Call [18:41]_

Jean could hear the rumble and shriek of metallic shutters, and figured he could at least let Mike know his shift had ended (technically ten minutes ago). Maybe if he lingered outside for a bit the air would take back some of its heat.

In the shop, Christa was polishing surfaces, wearing her bag over her shoulder. Golden stems of sunlit straw fell across her face when she glanced up at Jean, and the rest of her hair was tied back.

She smiled with shining whites resistant to the artificial lights above. 'Second day okay?'

Jean's spine quivered with laughter or something of the like.

'Great, thanks.' He pressed his lips, and squeezed past her. 'Am I needed for closing?'

'No, no, you're fine,' Christa shooed. She waved him off and the cloth in her hand flapped. 'See you next Friday.'

Jean hummed, thoroughly looking forward to another few hours of staring children, and watching the petite blonde actually have the balls to interact with the things. He waved his phone stiffly, 'see you.'

Outside, he heard a voice, was sure he saw the height of Ymir by the shop window, but he was sailing and swimming in blurred space, heat in his ears and cheeks. He didn't really hear or see more than the lights and the cars, and the road he had to cross.

His phone buzzed again.

 _[19:07]_ _  
_Out with Corn stash, sorry

**Con and Sash

 _Mike [19:08]_ _  
_Don't be too late home. We still need to talk.

 _Missed Call [21:16]_

Jean hadn't drunk much. The boy could barely breathe when he was in charge of his own body functions, let alone when he handed the little control he really had over to a whole other force. Figured he was scared of becoming as addicted to the freedom alcohol granted as he was addicted to calling out "my anxiety".

The floor in this place sparkled under toxic lights, and the flashes drove knives through his eyes, thoughts stabbing in time – he was disgusted – he was disgusting – Mike didn't need to know that – Mike didn't deserve that.

And who was he to decide what Mike did and didn't deserve? What would he think of Jean? How would he look at him? How intensely and piercingly and entirely similar would it feel to the way he felt the stares of others? Jean couldn't take that. That thought seemed to overrule the best of the war going on between his weakness and the gasping breaths of strength in him.

The old house had been as loud as this club. The bass was Jean's heartbeat in his ears, the voices and shouts all the same, but younger, angrier, accented by the growls of a head care worker so awful by nature no one could possibly have written his recommendation honestly. But Jean couldn't talk about honesty, and he couldn't compare this sticky place to the source of his nightmares without thinking about Mike's hand on his shoulder and his curious questions about what he learned at school that day, while he taught him about palettes.

He never asked, "How was school?" Probably because mention of the place put the fear of a rabbit tossed from a bush into the open forest in Jean's eyes and hands. That much was obvious. He didn't ask about people. And when he asked about Eren he approached with caution. It must have been strange to see then, both Jean and Mike as hesitant as one another, Mike as careful as a child learning its paces in a new world.

Next week, sat at the dinner table with the younger ones running by, room to room, Mike taught him about the layers and layers of people. He got him thinking about the flesh under the skin, the veins, the grime, and the geometric structure of bone holding all the soft bits together. Mr Hannes had been impressed by the realism his portraits at school had adopted. Jean had been impressed by the notion that a grown adult could look at a person and see something as simple as a fabrication of tissue and marrow. Jean saw eyes and words and judgements. Then he hid from them.

One week, Mike didn't visit Wednesday after school, when his crafts sessions with the kids were scheduled. Jean didn't draw a thing all week, until Saturday, when Mike signed in as his personal visitor.

Jean remembered the day when he found out Eren was getting fostered by some doctor, his wife and their other adopted daughter – a pretty girl with dark hair and dark, almond-shaped eyes. She'd had a quiet way of expression Jean related to the moment he saw her, before Eren grinned in his face and pointed between his eyes, sharp and accusing, and reminded him that, "horse face is stuck here". So when Dok called him into his office and asked Jean how he'd feel about Mike fostering him, the darkness in Jean's head evaporated and left a gaping white space of no response. It felt like he'd spent years trapped in a dark room and the exit had just appeared in front of him. How was he supposed to believe it could happen just like that?

It didn't happen so fast, obviously. There were weeks of paper work in which Jean's breathing didn't calm once and Dok wouldn't look at him – for the first time in a while, not because of the coffee stains Jean had left on his office carpet years past. Before Jean reached the moment when he stood with a packed bag at Mike's apartment door, expected to call the trinket-stocked cubbyhole home, he had a great long time of worrying about how he was going to live up to being what Mike wanted. Mike didn't have him from birth. Mike opened his hand to him as a teenager – chose him. How was Jean to tell the one adult who'd cared for him, his only parent beyond flashes of a brunette's face seen through the haze of baby eyes, that he should have returned him when he had the chance?

He felt like he'd cheated Mike out of the ideal father-son experience. Idealisms could still be had in a foster family. Yet, for Jean and Mike idealisms were all they were intended to be: dreams. Mike didn't know that yet. And now Jean stood in the corner of this dark, flashing, loud, hot club, still clinging onto the idea that he could avoid going home and ruining his dad's blissful ignorance. He didn't deserve to bear the knowledge that he'd picked up a defect. Jean didn't have to bear the reaction. He was sick of feeling stupid for being scared, and he was scared of being told he was stupid. From Mike, he couldn't take that.

Of course, he would never have found himself here if it weren't for Connie and Sasha. He'd have walked home, wishing he had the guts to get wasted and abandon himself all on his own. But he was a whiny child, and Connie and Sasha had held out sweets to him in the form of a very eloquent text suggesting they "get their life" downtown in celebration of Connie being assigned his apprenticeship.

He remembered this as he watched Connie attempt to twerk in front of Sasha, both held together under the sheen of sweat, behind elated smiles. Sasha picked up some of Beyoncé's choreography, shifting her head and hand side to side; as far side to side as she could in the tight tin of bodies.

Jean was happy standing where he was, not really drunk, sweating for different reasons, and hating himself for lifting away into his own head when his friend had genuinely achieved something this week.

* * *

Ghosts in the photograph  
Never lied to me  
I'd be all of that  
I'd be all of that

A false memory

Would be everything  
A denial  
My eliminent

What was that for?  
What was that for?  
\- Mogwai, 'Take Me Somewhere Nice'

* * *

A/N:

Paranoia - The Death Set  
Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush  
Fever - The Black Keys  
Your Touch - The Black Keys  
The Rising Tide - The Killers  
Take Me Somewhere Nice - Mogwai  
Any Movement - Dog Is Dead


	5. Grown Ocean

You would come to me then without answers  
Lick my wounds and remove my demands for now  
Eucalyptus and orange trees are blooming  
In that dream there's no darkness alluded  
\- _Fleet Foxes, 'Grown Ocean'_

* * *

Jean really had to stop comparing Mike to a baby, but it was a real struggle when every troubling emotion just looked so _difficult_ for him to handle. When Jean had entered the apartment last night he'd walked no more awkwardly than usual, and his mind had been far from laughter. Especially when, while passing the kebab place on the corner, he'd received a message from Hitch:

 _big goldie locks texted me asking for you wtf have you done_

At that point, his panic levels escalated to full on heaving, tainted with a fair bit of gratification, considering his friend had moved on from calling Mike "papa bear".

After his entrance he'd found the man himself standing with his arms crossed, leant against the kitchen worktop with a look of total lost frustration mutating his face. He looked like a teenager waiting to confront their toddler sibling about the broken console on the floor. As though he had all of this anger in him and no idea how intensely he was really supposed to approach the situation. Jean hadn't quite seen the fun it then, though. He was too busy staring wide-eyed at the protruding vein in Mike's forearm, realising he could most definitely chuck Jean out the window if he said something stupid right now, soggy jumper over his shoulder, gaping in the doorway.

What was really laughable was Jean's slow crouch down to carefully, quietly take his shoes off and slide them against the wall behind him, unable to look away as their eyes remained locked. It wasn't a comfortable silence, or a comfortable stare-off, but after striding home with pent-up nerves he'd reached the point of agitation. He never wanted to compare Mike to Eren either, but the stubborn static fizzling between Jean and his foster father was too familiar to ignore – and, really, what choice was Jean getting in any part of this? There stood the one person he could never bear to tell, waiting to be told, "people terrify me to the extent where I don't feel like I can live a regular life", or in translation:

"I can't be the person you want nor deserve me to be."

Instead of anything being said, there was a moment in which the darkness in Mike's eyes gradually diluted, his brow smoothened, and his arms loosened. Jean watched every part of him unwind. His eyes darted away, seeking comfort in the ceiling, the floor, the back of the couch, theSimpsons magnets on the fridge from old cereal boxes. And Mike's gusting sigh brought him back to the ground.

'I didn't want to say anything over the phone,' he paused, swapping his crossed ankles, 'because I knew it could be a... _weird_ subject for you.'

In clarification, Jean still hadn't known what this "subject" was, but he had his abstract ideas.

He couldn't help but use another of Hitch's phrases in this situation lacking means to describe the way he felt; like he was birthing a trolley full of whim-whams out his arse. But he really didn't want to think about all the texts he got that day when Hitch had severe constipation after going on holiday with her family. He had his own shit to worry about – and he _promised_ he didn't find the whole thing this funny yesterday.

That mostly came down to the fact that Mike's next words were the truly "weirdest" part of the debacle. They were the grossest Jean had heard all week. Not because he said he got Jean a volunteering placement, which, in all frankness, was the lesser of options to Jean considering he could have worked with an artist and not had to have been as involved as volunteering required. His words were gross because of _where_ the placement was, and when the start date was. The next day –

But, technically, this was a trial day. "Petra says if you don't like it she won't hold it against you, you don't have to go back". Jean had stropped in a way that had seemed qualified at the time, but in memory came across as a hissy fit. He'd shut his room door a little louder than usual, he'd thrown some things around, did a little crying and staring at the ceiling – a full grown twenty year old. Despite looking down on baby Jean, sitting with his bag in his lap and his head against the train window, he couldn't deny that this really was the worst of all possible options. He just wished he knew how to handle it in any way other than having childish fits of emotion he didn't have anything else to do with.

Trundling between stops, the sky was currently the kind of grey which made it appear like vacant space, airless space, like a pocket of nothing. There were no visible clouds, no shifting wisps, no lines, no dark smudges. All blank. The slips of towns he saw over fences, walls and bridges had what stingy old ladies would call "character".

His placement was at a foster home. Mike still had contacts from his old collaborative art sessions for kids. And where better to send someone who'd been trying to ignore his memories of foster care?

This was the bit where Jean's rant rights snuffed out. If he'd stopped his march to his room last night halfway and sat on the couch, he could have looked Mike in the eye – or, realistically, he could have looked at the floor – and told him that it was a terrible, terrible idea. Or, he could have gone home two weeks ago and said something about the block of blue-green paint he'd left at the studio – said something about how it made him want to throw up – said something about how he was having trouble with his breathing, or how Nile Dok's face had been snarling in his mind's eye every day since term started and all his creativity fell out his ass and ran away somewhere. He could have said _something_. But he didn't, because he's a coward. Now he's on a train.

The speaker crackled as a voice announced the only stop in Stohess. Jean didn't look anywhere too long as he stepped down off the train and tried to focus on each stone stair up to level ground and not the gap he'd just leapt, between the doors and the platform. Cool air flooded up the back of Jean's t-shirt as the train made its grating exit known to the whole town. The level crossing flashed and the barrier rose to allow him onto the street of houses fit with plastic plaques of tenants and their doorbells. It was the first apartment building he'd seen in a while that didn't have at least eight floors. Someone had taken a skyscraper, sat it on its side, bashed the brickwork around, fitted smaller windows complete with bright-blooming plant boxes, and slapped a slate roof on top.

All the houses were fairly similar, just switching brickwork, paint colours and specific types of hydrangea. The shops on the "high street" had just the right amount of dirt on their windows and fade in their signs to please aesthetic-chasing hipsters stuck in the city, not knowing what they were missing. There wasn't a Starbucks in sight, and Jean felt a little lost without having them as landmarks at every corner. There were the brands of supermarkets most people expected to have died out, bakers and grocers, three charity shops in a row simply quaking with competitive business. In the centre of the street there were only a few parking spaces taken, and only a few bodies milled around. Most places were shut for Sunday. He could feel a little better about walking through the place he didn't know, but knew the likes of, with only the odd old guy passing; too busy watching where he placed his walking stick to mind Jean.

Walking further along, through different streets, he picked up on names he recalled from the head care worker's email sent late last night. _Calryan Street_. _Rose Street_. He'd stared at the email on his phone screen over one handful of dry cereal this morning and on the train, ears perking up every time the announcer spoke only to flop back down again with the jitters when his stop wasn't called. On Rowan Road he encountered one of his favourite quirks so far: an elderly care home sidled up to a funeral home.

Streets began to twist and lengthen. Houses evolved into having front gardens, driveways, side fences, side gates. And when he came across a dog park, echoing with the squawks of waggle-toothed mouths, and the trees edging the rails sprouted carvings of initials, and the lampposts switched from classic black lanterns to tinny, hooked monstrosities, some a little squint in the ground and defaced, he didn't even need signs to know he was getting closer. His fingers still latched onto his phone though.

It was quiet, and that left him with only his nerves to speak. He questioned every turn he made, looking the other way and seeing impossibly more houses filled with people who could look out their windows, children who could run out onto the road and call on him, asking him where he was going, and "are you sure that's a great idea?" Because, no, imaginary child, he wasn't sure it was.

By the time he reached Orvud Drive he was well and truly confused. It wasn't as though the old house had been a crooked haunted castle on a hill, but it had a curved drive of gravel the school bus driver refused to squeeze around and the house sat alone there, old white paint, moss-framed patio stones, Dok grimacing through his office window, hating his life. This street showed no signs of its perpetual wind of semi-detached houses ever giving way to something more (or less, the way Jean saw it).

There was a wall which ran around Jean's shoulders, teasingly wrapping him up and suffocating him with every pace. Over its top, grass slanted uphill to each house, meaning Jean was trapped between the washed-out brickwork and the parked cars no one had space for. The road behind the houses, Jean remembered from before everything began to look the same, had sloped uphill and grown shrouded by fencing, bushes and trees, like an exit leading further out from civilisation.

When the wall began to lower and the houses deflated so that their foundations lay at Jean's head, he felt his breath come a little easier. Then Jean passed a gap in the wall that didn't host stairs, and the plants from the neighbouring houses spilled over the ends, almost masking the redbrick building burrowed between the heights of the others. Two cars were parked on the rosy gravel Jean's converse crunched across, one a blue ford with that beetle shell kind of shimmer he knew would be baking the vehicle's innards as though it were a baked potato in tin foil. Plant pots sat under the front door and windows, most of them cracked, a few broken with their soil guts spilling onto steps and stones. In them, pansies bloomed pastel and purple, and while one on the left held one of those whirring windmills, one on the right held gummy bears with cocktail sticks stabbed up their butts or through their topsy-turvy heads.

He'd seen the sign _Orvud's Place_ on the wall edge, and the smaller text underneath: "children's home". So, he knew he'd found the right place. And he knew it would've looked worse had it rained yesterday and the gummy bears by the door gone mouldy. The _Welcome_ mat was rough and worn, and Jean's toes underlined the squiggly, thick marker written above the sewn word: "NOT". When Jean spotted an abandoned water pistol by the wheel of the blue car, tank open and dripping, he couldn't help but suspect someone was trying to tell him something. He was sure Connie probably did similar things when he'd lived with his parents. By the time he joined Jean at the old house he'd moved onto more extravagant things. Although, there was a sound simplicity to this work he could appreciate.

Sweat rippled around the little bumps on the pads of Jean's fingers, leaving pale prints on his locked phone screen. One hand shoved in his pocket to keep still and discreetly wipe at the damp feeling. The other brought up the email from Ms Ral on his phone again:

 _My office is just by the front door, so let yourself in and give my door a knock! :)_

Unsure whether the smiley face was boring into his eyes or his eyes were boring into the smiley face, Jean considered the many possibilities at this point. This included everything from staring at the gummy bears for a little while longer and then leaving, to welcoming himself in and knocking on her office to find that she wasn't in there. The latter, he imagined, would probably end with a kid spotting him in the hallway and screaming, "Stranger danger", so he eyed the large window by the door dubiously. With a glimpse back at the age-dulled doorknocker, he paced his feet heel to toe on the stones, trying to squint through the slanted blinds in a way which would allow him to casually recover if the head of house just happened to be looking back at him through the window, which she wasn't. Though, he did see movement of some sort by a tall unit, and that was most definitely a goldfish staring him in the face from the windowsill, tank bubbling - she looked kind of busy - the head, not the fish, and –

'Can I help you?'

– And Jean quite simply shat his pants.

Whipping around, not _seeing_ spectacularly well, Jean droned an intelligent, 'I-uh'. He swore his voice only broke once, but with the way the walls of his throat were trying to clench around nothing, the way his Adam's apple was trying to hi-five his chin... He only managed to receive sight of a broad, grey chest lettered in white and two brown eyes, warm even in the dull light and framed by the most ridiculous eyelashes.

'I-' Jean cleared his throat, wishing his flushed body would let him fade into the pink gravel and make a chameleon's scuttling exit. He tried again, unable to look away from the dark lashes curved around the man's eyes. They were tipped blond where they brushed his delicate skin, as though they'd picked up the gold of his cheeks in ichorous drops. He tried _again_.

'I'm looking for Petra Ral.'

The stranger let out a hum and realisation widened his eyes. Jean just pressed his lips, not trusting himself while he was lost in what he was witnessing; the shadows of foliage played with the guy's face in the most glorious ways, having Jean's hand twitching for a pencil, an entire printing workshop, a whole roll of paper. The leaves halved his answering smile and both sides were equally warm and wonderful.

Jean watched his lips flutter around words. They were reddish in the centre and a grained pink around their curves, like sweet pea petals – and he hadn't actually heard a word – just laughter from the park streets past and general road noise – birds in the bushes.

Fingertips extended to his chest-level.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so disturbingly embarrassed. He'd described showing artists his work as exposure, him with his chest out, them with a knife in their hand, but here Jean had the knife and just had to stab himself and hope he didn't hit anything critical.

He shook the guy's hand - Forgot about his most probably sweaty state until the second their hands touched. 'I'm Jean,' he tried. He didn't let it last longer than a second, and then the guy was laughing, head back, all neck.

'And I'm Marco,' his laugh bubbled through his words. Jean wasn't disgusted by the sound. But a weight dropped in him and crumbled into sloshing pieces when he got the impression that _Marco_ had already covered their names. Of course, others at the home would have known he was coming – and of course he'd already managed to look like a tit not even two minutes into his arrival.

Marco turned and hefted up a bucket of water, which hadn't been there before Jean humiliated himself on all levels, placing it by the doormat. He then pulled on the door handle and let it swing open. 'Petra's through on the right, right there,' he directed, eyes and lips light, brown hair falling into lashes from leaning.

'Thanks,' Jean tried to answer (he was doing a lot of trying). It barely passed for a whisper. Then he suddenly found himself clearing his throat and speaking again, 'guessing that's a new development?'

Marco looked through Jean's legs, straining over the step in his skinny jeans, at the "NOT Welcome" mat. In reply, he waved the foaming sponge from the bucket, dribbling water onto the doorframe, down the front of his shirt – and he wasn't embarrassed, didn't notice, didn't care. 'Yeah, we have some crafty ones who wanted to welcome you,' he spoke through smiling teeth, nose twitching, and Jean wondered when he was going to stop picking up on every little detail here.

'The gummy bears are a little more creative.' The thought slipped from mind to tongue and its confidence confused Jean.

He swallowed hard when Marco's face fell in confusion. His eyes were ridiculously expressive and just looking at them made Jean feel guilty for wiping the smile off his face. Jean pointed meekly at the broken plant pot, chewy sweets displayed in open, sloping graves.

When Marco followed his gaze the smile came back, but it quickly tensed. 'Oh, that's-uh... Wow...' He blinked long and slow at the sweet take on botany. Breath sighed out through his teeth.

'Dare I ask?' Jean drawled. Something a bit loud had popped into light in his chest. His lips curved up at the one side.

Marco pressed his weight to the sponge on the mat, soap bubbling in a collar around it. 'You'll know the culprit when you meet them,' he grinned.

And Jean's feet began stuttering around the door – quiet again. He felt that confident light dwindle and all that was left between them was the wet scraping of the sponge on the mat. He waved awkwardly as he closed the door on _Marco_ and his perfect smile, and his soft voice lilting around Jean's name, the right way, on the first go – and he would now, typically, behind the closed door, be able to piece together the words he'd missed. He had to stare at the white wall for a bit before he could knock on Ms Ral's door. On said wall there just so happened to be an itty bitty mirror through which he could curse his blushing face, and as he stared he could hear recognisable music muffled behind the office door.

When he did knock, even his knuckles were hesitant and his eyes admired the floor. It was a lovely apple green; no phthalo in sight.

While the hallway smelled like a bizarre combination of cut grass and playdough, the second Jean opened the door upon the bright command, "come in", the sharp smell of coffee hit him in the face. Reflexively, he adjusted his glasses. He tried not to think about brown spillages, sopping paper work, Dok's red-flaming face, or the drawings the man tore up that day. He'd never felt so startled, so _scared_ as he had then, with that couple's baby shaking its rattle in the hallway in time with his racing heartbeat.

Daylight flooded this office in strips. There were no spillages by the desk, no Dok in the chair behind it. There was, however, a woman with sleek, coppery hair shaking her hips to Fleetwood Mac by the filing cabinet.

She didn't turn when the door groaned open. She didn't turn when Jean groaned (he wasn't sure if it was a prelude to actual words or just a numb-brain noise gone rogue). She waited until Stevie Nicks started singing, then pivoted, and her lips finally formed around words.

Jean just stared. Meeting people for the first time was always an intensely awkward endeavour; he, too, loved throwing himself around to the occasional synth hit in the dark hours when he knew Mike was busy being coaxed into playing drinking games with Hange while they marked papers in the kitchen; after all, getting down to a bit of grade-A dad etiquette known as "jamming" wasn't something someone wanted to be caught doing. And still, the head care worker pointed right at Jean's stupid face and lip-synched every line of 'Sisters of the Moon' _immaculately_.

This made the whole first meeting thing a little more awkward. What was he supposed to do with his hands?

'Petra Ral?'

He couldn't berate himself for his lame attempts. His brain was dribbling words.

The woman thankfully stopped before she could start gyrating, and simply smiled – 'Hi, sorry.' She waved Jean forward and he wondered how much worse he would feel if he were to trip and fall on his face. 'All the kids are outside, so I was taking 'vantage,' she tittered as she turned back to the cabinet and slipped a few more files into place. 'Won't be long before they get back and want things.'

When she faced him and pulled out her wheeled seat her nose had turned up a little, but Jean was surprised to find the smile still there. She sang under her breath and whacked a heavy file onto her desk before opening it and scribbling at the bottom of the first and last few pages. Jean watched in a liquid state. His hand lingered on the chair across from her, and he had no idea what was appropriate for him to do or say. He couldn't see how others so effortlessly made the distinction. But none of it mattered because he was lost in the photos and certificates on the pinboard by the window.

A lot of the faces were washed out in waves of daylight. There were hands on shoulders, glimpses of friendly teeth, arms disappearing behind the bodies they were wrapped around. The important details demanded his gaze and then threw him away. His eyes reeled a bit after that. There were so many things to look at, and so many he couldn't be bothered acknowledging – what use were happy photos in a place like this? Instead, his eyes settled on the fairy jiggling on a spring atop Ms Ral's pen. Her shoulders bobbed while she wrote and her voice came in lyrical washes of, "black widow" and "black moons".

Jean's hand was startled off the chair when she belted, 'heavy persuasion... it was hard to breathe-a-ha, there we go –'

The file was closed and her pen sat down with a final jiggle. She partially stood and took Jean's hand. He shook it and shook off thoughts of his stumbles with Marco outside, or his meetings with artists on Monday, or that one time his English teacher shook his hand on parents evening – that was weird –

'Sorry about that,' Petra chimed. The glaze over Jean's face smashed. 'Whenever one of the rascals gets into bother at school we need to follow it up with the social workers, but never mind. You must be Jean – apologies for the abrupt start, it's the only time we could have you over like this.'

He stared at the dark gap between her rows of smiling teeth. It expectantly drew breath, in and out, and through it her tongue watched him back.

'Y-yeah. It's fine.' Unhappy with the current levels of awkwardness, he added, 'hi.' His hand wanted to wave, but he wouldn't let it, and he gratefully took the seat when she offered.

Her arms folded on the desk. 'Now, Mike says you've been looking for some sort of work experience,' she prompted and Jean's head nodded while his eyes drifted from the fair hairs on her arms, white gold in the light, to the photos by the window, to the fish tank on the sill.

'Yeah.' He subtly tried to clear his throat. 'I need a month of volunteering, or interning... somewhere. For my course.'

This time Petra nodded along with him, turning off the CD player with a grey-brick remote; he was probably too quiet; or maybe his words were too saliva-heavy to make any sense.

'Well, I think especially for you, a place here would be ideal –' Jean's mouth quirked at her creative take, and it fell as he realised she and Mike had probably been talking a lot. She knew he was in the system. 'Your jobs would be simple house tasks, like a trainee worker would get in their first month. You'd have as little or as much to do with the kids as you felt comfortable with, but, really,' Petra's brow hilled with concern, and then pain, 'staff keep walking in on the older ones watching dire teen shows with younger ones in the room. I feel like they could really do with a more realistic, active influence, your age.'

Mirth drilled up Jean's spine and spilled from his eyes at the very idea of him influencing anyone in any positive way. He could play Simon Says with them. But he'd be too scared of fucking up. Surely there had to be some kind of warning flag for adults who were terrified of failure in children's games? Like a government official certificate he could hand to people in scenarios like this. Never mind self esteem, _that's_ what Jean needed in his life.

'Sure,' was all he said.

Petra hadn't had much more to say; some "welcomes" more welcoming than the welcome mat, but they were only as comforting as they could've been for Jean, in an out-of-body situation like this. As he wandered the house he felt as though he was floating with his back skimming the stucco ceiling, throwing memories down to his head – falling down the stairs, pushing Eren down the stairs. He imagined, if he were floating, the bumps of the paint job would cause more painful shivers to rack his back than those he felt as he followed the pair of black brogue boots in front upstairs. He imagined he'd feel lighter, freer. On his feet, he was hollow and flooded with unwanted thoughts and faces. And it would all have been so much easier to handle if he didn't have all his nervous ticks in play. He'd wound up alone again, with Marco.

Petra reiterated the same phrases Mike had last night and this morning: "trial day", "if you don't like it, never mind", "if you're uncomfortable, that's okay". It seemed increasingly clear that everyone felt they had to convince him he wasn't stuck here the moment he stepped over the vandalised mat and all but fell into the house. He was very aware that this wasn't permanent. He didn't feel the same way he'd felt when he arrived at the old house as a five year old and smelled the damp in the hallway before he saw it. The walls didn't talk down to him here like they had there; "we're trapping you for the next twelve years". The plaster just breathed quiet and still in the daylight. And laughter rang distantly through open windows.

'This part is easy enough.'

Marco's eyes were darker on the upstairs landing, with the window behind them casting Jean over him, tall and grey. Beyond that, Jean felt very small. He nodded along, swallowing thick saliva.

Marco explained, 'everyone's names are on their doors, and all of them beyond that are pretty basic – laundry cupboard, bathroom, staff bedroom, smaller bathroom, and that's just the boiler,' he waved off. 'We have to keep it locked because the kids like to play around and pretend it's the TARDIS.'

'Had some cold winters then?'

It was impulsive, and he didn't know where it came from. The kind of impulsive which made figment Jean floating above want to kick "grounded" Jean in the head.

But then Marco smiled, all big and cheek-bending. 'They only broke it once, that I know of. But this is only my second year here.'

As they meandered forward, Jean's mind stopped racing and started jumping on the spot – the same spot, over and over – because he wondered, more than ever before, if his reactions to things looked as awkward and manufactured as he felt them. He figured it was the house's fault. This corridor of doors was too familiar and his body tightened as he walked through it, as though before he had been floating through space, but now he'd lost his suit and breath was being taken from him fast. He was freezing over.

Through glass layers of skin, he could hear Marco talking about staff overnight stays and cleaning schedules. His eyes were quiet-toned, same as his voice. They retained stain glass panes of a dark, glistening gold whenever his face turned to Jean and the window behind them wrapped its light around him. Jean wished the light would stop loosening its grip so easily, stop letting him turn away. His eyes pulled Jean's focus from the names on the doors and their maudlin decor; footballs, sunshine, smiley faces, a Batman symbol. Jean's had been only a slip of paper with his name written on it in pen, and pencil love notes from Eren had kissed around it; comments about how he was never going to manage this, how he smelled like that... The signs here made a great chunk of Jean want to remake his own, reclaim it. The rest of him shrivelled in on itself, wishing he'd taken the chance to escape when Petra'd offered.

She'd stood with him in the hallway, arm to the front door, and gave him a way out. He didn't have to meet the kids. He didn't have to feel their eyes all over him, knowing they resented his presence every bit he hated guest presences when he'd been in their tiny, shit-stained trainers. Yet, he didn't take the chance. And he refused to believe it had anything to do with the gold-speckled eyes and gold-speckled skin which came around the door after Petra spoke. A few inches taller than Jean, with the light behind him, Marco had shadowed over him in the front doorway. It hadn't been at all menacing. Just difficult to say "no" to.

Stuttering their steps on the upstairs landing, Jean and Marco paused by a door with a purple name sign featuring shoes and tigers. It read, "Anka". So, plain and stoutly, now Jean knew their names, as though they didn't mean anything at all. Just names on doors. He didn't know if he even _could_ leave after this. How long was he supposed to stay?

'Is it okay if I check in on her a sec?' Marco's lashes fell and rose like wings and Jean just watched them a while.

When his eyes narrowed somewhere between amusement and concern, Jean choked and fumbled for words. 'Yeah, I- that's fine,' he pushed his voice out and it felt like he was trying to pop a bubble in his throat.

Marco smiled so easefully. He knocked on the door and received a droning sound in affirmation.

'How come you're not out with the others?' he quizzed, leaning around the door, with his damp shirt slipping just that little bit up his back – just enough to reveal the freckles beaded there. It was the first time Jean noticed them, and he wondered, eyes faded on Marco's profile, his extended neck, how he hadn't noticed them sooner. He could imagine, below the cotton rippled across his back, the tan drops trickled down, spiralled out.

Around the door, a voice whined about high school homework, and Marco's profile pivoted to Jean, a smile peeling back planes of so many fucking freckles he'd managed to pass over on the way to his eyes. He'd only glanced at him, but Jean was sure he felt the bubble pop in his throat. He was so easeful. He made Jean want to be easeful. But those thoughts were just wants and wishes.

Muffledly, the girl's voice carried on, 'I don't see why I should go out with them anyway. I'm too old for the park, and besides, one of them stole my science prize.'

Marco's eyes crinkled at "too old", but then narrowed at "stole". 'What did you get?'

'It was just sweets, but I worked really hard on that project and I deserved those.' Jean recognised that pleading tone, the begging it took for anything to actually get done in a place like this, with so many little faces care workers had to keep watch over.

Marco's hand took to his neck as he stood upright and winced. 'This prize wouldn't by any chance have been gummy bears?' he tested.

Jean recalled the gummy grave yard by the front door, and tried his very, very best not to laugh.

'Yeah... why?' Anka called, dreading and suspicious. She kept calling and calling, beyond Marco's shadowed face, turned to Jean – even when Marco deterred her and shut her door, she still called through the grain, 'what did she do?!'

Marco turned to him and heaved a sigh. When his hand left his forehead it left behind freckles and falling brown feathers, and his eyes found Jean beneath them.

That little loud light crackled in Jean's chest again. 'So the culprit's infamous?'

Marco's laugh drifted up, and if Jean had still been scraping along the ceiling he'd have drifted back down into himself at the sound.

On their way down the stairs, Marco talked about various duties Jean most definitely didn't want to be landed with – the weekly shop, homework check, afterschool pick-up. Check-outs terrified him and he couldn't remember _shit_ from maths at school.

The light in him burned as the lamp at the end of the stairs flickered on. 'Don't give me pick-up,' he warned. 'Not one child would come back safely.'

As they turned into the kitchen and Petra turned to them, Jean became overtly aware of his own smile. Marco's laughter fed through his words to the auburn-haired woman: 'what's for dinner?'

Petra gestured to the half dozen empty Bird's Eye boxes on the island counter. 'Would you like to stay, Jean?'

The corners of Jean's mouth had been difficult to train back down before then. Now he gaped, and the bubble in his throat had definitely popped, because he was vacuuming in dry air fast. 'I-um –'

'I could eat,' Marco interjected, leaning on the counter, with his shirt doing that stupid thing again. He looked over his shoulder at Jean.

The blushing buffoon in the doorway nodded statically. 'Uh-yeah,' he mumbled. 'Yeah, please.'

Petra pursed her lips around what he presumed was laughter and added more fish fingers to the trays. Jean was so glad someone could find amusement in his slow, sludgy descent through the floor.

It wasn't like he'd had much choice. He didn't have a choice, did he? It would have been rude to refuse dinner after having been offered a placement here – because this set-up was saving him, wasn't it? He'd still've been whipping around streets, head-ducked, drying and drying his hands, trying to find artists to work with, avoiding schools and unions and _homes_ – because this set-up wasn't... ideal. He didn't want to keep using the word. It just had a habit of creeping up on him.

The kitchen here was massive. At the old house, there'd been a dining table he had to squeeze around, as though he was trying to measure how many "Jean" made up the room's perimeter. And once he'd tackled past Jaeger, he could only sit and breathe in heavily the smell of whatever soup of leftovers would be coming through the door.

Here, the kitchen counters squared off the appliances from the rest of the room, and a long bumpy-grained table made up the excess space.

When Jean sat down he didn't care about whether these thoughts of the old house settled or unsettled him further; he'd been grasping at the air to pull distractions out of the chaotic nothingness – take that table, Petra's smile, the orange walls, Marco's hook-edged eyes. He'd felt the shine of them reflect light off his face like metal in sunlight. Especially when the front door banged open and a stream of voices crowded ever closer with a great, resounding, 'it doesn't matter how much fun the dog had, Isabel! He wasn't yours to take to the river, and now that lady has mud prints all over her cardigan.'

A guy with blond hair tied back in a bun had shook Jean's hand, which had felt oddly dry, but wavered with the cold weight of ice. He was Eld, another care worker. Then there was Gunther, a guy with olive-toned skin, gelled black hair and eyebrows so thin and light that Jean mildly terrified himself by mentally applying the hefty load of head of board Smith's brows on top of them. His hand had started to sweat again by the time Gunther helped a young boy down from his shoulders and had the pleasure of greeting him.

And that was the way things had been for the past ten minutes. Noise; high voices with a lot to say, low voices with reprimands and polite questions for Jean. Eyes; dark and smiling, wide and curious, mature and apologetic. Names were thrown around and Jean almost lost his place with his dry-damp sweat tracking, or his breath counting, or his pulse pacing. As for dinner, he tried to take each bite of the melting, salty nostalgia in his stride. He figured in order to get it all down his tight throat he'd need to gag himself with a plunger, so for the most part he just took it a pea at a time.

Petra had introduced him while the kids were too ravenous to care for him, scrambling into chairs and pushing at each other because, 'that's my seat, Isabel!'

Jean had waved awkwardly, and turned towards mumbled "hellos" and two massive green eyes in his face, the size and proximity of which he'd have been more comfortable seeing through binoculars. They were "Isabel's" meridians. And in his match up of bedroom door signs to faces, she was the superhero. In Jean's memories, eyes like those, big and oceanic as they were, stirred up villainy. She looked like Eren.

She'd been kneeling on her chair, peering at him level-eyed, with the gap between her front teeth sucking him in, between question after question after – 'If a dog came up to you and invited you to the river, would you say no?'

Jean's mouth fell toothy and crooked as he lost track of all his nervousness for a moment of sheer bemusement. He replied, 'well, I'd be kinda surprised if –'

'But say it _did_ speak to you,' she pressed, wobbling as she rose to stand on her chair. 'You would feel a bit silly saying no, wouldn't you – because it's a talking dog – you don't get many of those.'

Jean had blinked and before he could think, he was speaking. 'Well, I think, in that situation you need to consider that you wouldn't be expecting the dog to speak, so you'd probably be too busy going into a pre-emptive state of shock to answer them.'

Isabel had wibble-wobbled on her chair some more and squawked, '"well" that's a really dull answer though, isn't it? You're not at all cooperating.'

Helplessly, Jean had torn away from her boring, prodding eyes and found Marco sat across from him, trying to control the laughter convulsing his shoulders. Visibly biting around a smile, Marco ordered, 'sit down, Izzy. Be nice.'

Next to Marco, the young boy who'd clambered down from Gunther's shoulders shouted to the rusty-haired girl about "standing down", then shot her with his hands cocked in gun formation. Jean swore he felt a spatter of spit on his ear when the girl made sound effects of impact and wailed as she slid down in her seat.

A few more shot wounds around the table later and Jean knew the boy's name to be Farlan. His blond hair was still at that wispy stage and his cheeks had rosy chub which could compete with Jean's own flush. He was a quarter pile of peas and two fish fingers away from finishing his food, and it was going down a lot easier with only the odd glance at him deflecting off the mass attack on the girl beside him.

'– It's not okay to take something that's not yours, without asking permission.' This was the most exasperated Jean had heard Marco all afternoon. Currently, he was making a point of not looking at him because the pink shade from his lips had started staining behind the freckles on his cheeks in a way that made Jean want to tell him about it. He knew that was not at all okay. He hated redness being pointed out for himself – but he also knew his intentions weren't malicious. He just wanted some pastels and paper instead of the food. Or a bowl of steaming confidence.

Isabel's eyes widened with thought and Jean braced himself, caught somewhere between watching her and his quivering fork.

'Yeah, _but_ ,' she drew out her voice, 'the money I got for tidying the garage was mine and Petra took that from me without asking.'

Jean watched in horror as she rammed an entire fish finger in her mouth.

'Isabel – chewing –'

'That's because you pushed Tom into a puddle in PE!' Farlan cried.

'Mouth closed, Izzy –'

'Doesn't mean I shouldn't get what she said I'd get.'

'My history teacher, Mr Rankin says that not accepting consequences is where the Germans went wrong.'

At that, all staff in the room, Marco at the table, Eld and Gunther at the island counter, stilled and looked at the shaven-haired boy seated a few bodies away from Isabel, who looked very conflicted. The boy kept eating complacently, stealing forkfuls from underfoot the toy soldiers decorating his plate.

Jean bit hard on his fork and glanced at Marco's mouth. His lips quaked as he tried and tried again to find words.

Feeling increasingly transparent, Jean ended up biting his tongue when Isabel smacked the table with fervour. 'Doesn't matter what Mr Rank says – it's disrespectful not coughing up when you said you would,' her eyes were ablaze and Jean had to lean back a little and fight back thoughts of Eren's determined scowls. Isabel's brow was set in fields of furrows and her eyes darted about in search of argument. 'Mafia bosses always get their money when they ask for it, in those shows on the telly, and they don't even need to tidy the smelly garage for it! Why am I different?'

Anka – Jean now saw she was a few years older than the others, with acne starting to plague her pale forehead – sat at the head of the table and rolled her eyes. She growled, 'because you're not a f-reaking mafia boss!'

'Oh my god.'

Jean briefly met Marco's eyes, brown staring exhaustedly through the hand over his face, and his thoughts of Eren and all other sense of plaguing familiarity stilled. He remembered the symbol on Isabel and Farlan's door.

'Look at it hypothetically,' he started, already wondering why the hell he was speaking and most likely receiving similar thoughts from the biblical army of children assembled around the table. Marco kept watching him, the two care workers at the kitchen counter were watching him, every child was watching him – Isabel was squinting at him with potato on her lip. 'In Batman, the mafia gets regular money from shareholders and connections.' He glanced around and then stumbled upon a sudden fascination with cutlery. 'But, without thinking about what they already have, they go on heists, they don't watch their behaviour. Then Batman beats 'em up and when they all go to jail, their money doesn't matter anymore. So the mafia needs to learn how to earn and ease off graciously.'

Jean felt his face heat up, as he was pretty sure Marco was laughing at him and he didn't want to think about how much Hitch would have paid to see this – hear him _barf_ words –

'Petra's Batman!' Jean heard a kid squeal down the table – _Hugo_? _Sam_?

Isabel sniffed and stabbed at her peas. 'That's not a good thing. Batman's just all _sad_ ,' her face morphed and her voice deepened, 'and _dark_ and he punches people and then he just- he just gets _sadder_ and _darker_.'

'No he doesn't!'

'Yes he does! Batgirl is so much better.'

Jean blinked slowly as he gazed at the fridge. He looked to Marco, and mouthed, 'sorry,' reminding himself to flay Mike later for sending him here – for not sending him to some boot camp for the socially inept. But he saw only shaking shoulders and watering eyes as Marco ate behind his hand and tried not to choke. The light through the window was fading to brilliant yellow, and his warm eyes looked the richest they had yet.

In this light, Jean remembered how quiet dinners at the old house had been. It didn't matter how much Eren ranted, how loud Reiner laughed. When the sky was enveloped in the yellow of the sun's last efforts and the world soaked in those few minutes of bright, sombre light, Jean would be thinking of the walk home from school, when he was alone and happy with simple thought. Or he'd recall the faces he'd drawn that day. He'd caught the yellow of the room and faded into himself so far and fast, he was lost for the hour. Then it was night and he could sleep and draw some more. He could be a little wishful.

Here, there wasn't much chance in getting lost. So long as he didn't watch Marco's eyes take conflict; the browns and oranges swam between visions of a laughing child and an adult bound by whatever the hell was required to keep this horde of babbling kids quiet and fed.

'– it doesn't matter how constipated you think Batman looks,' Marco cried. 'Batgirl owes Boss Anka a pack of gummy bears, and seeing as she's such a spokesperson for respect, she should respect her dues.' His eyes stilled their laughter and it was difficult to associate his pointed, serious stare-down with his words. At this point, Jean was sure no one could believe their own words, or believe that this debate was really happening. Or, maybe he was just new to this.

The button of Isabel's nose retracted and her baby face scrunched. 'I thought I was the mafia boss in this hippo-thetical talk – That was a load of rubbish.'

'Oh, come on,' Marco muttered, and Jean just watched the madness he'd inadvertently initiated. 'Point is, stealing is wrong, and now you'll have one pound less pocket money this week to pay for Anka's prize.'

'Fine,' she conceded. It sounded a little too willing for Jean's liking, but he figured, as Marco went back to cutting up Farlan's dinner, that after many battles like that, staff here were probably willing to take any form of reparation just to end it.

While Gunther began to cautiously approach the topic of Franz's dodgy history teacher, Jean's head whipped to his plate; he kept staring at the triangle of freckles atop Marco's frustrated blush, and he was sure he'd made awkward eye contact with him when Marco glanced up before standing and taking his plate to the sink. Though, his embarrassment trickled in a moat around central thought as he looked down and found distraction in a slice of cratered white on the floor.

A small, tanned hand latched onto the slice of bread and craned it up. Isabel stuffed it back into her bulging pocket, under the table, and gave Jean a single nod. Noting the empty, crumb-laden plate on the centre of the table, he figured he'd be better off floating back up to the ceiling and making a dazed exit before he could go down as an accomplice for whatever this was.

'Did you get your "welcome"?' she asked, and her knowing grin was far too well practiced for someone her age –what, six? Seven?

Jean spotted the single freckle on the knuckle of Marco's thumb as he reached over for his plate. 'Yeah. That was great,' he praised, eyes glazed and yellow encasing him from the window behind as he watched Marco's broad smile turn away. He noticed his shirt was bunched at the back of his jeans; a slip of tan showed at his hip, and he was daintily lined with the shadow of the blinds in the way Jean imagined his pencil would break down his body before outlining. 'Thanks,' he noted.

He wasn't sure who he was talking to now. Maybe he really _was_ thankful for the gummy bears. From the second he saw them at the door, all through the afternoon, they'd given him reason to speak and reason to be silent, depending on which he felt up to at the time. They'd made the day a series of instances – faces, greetings, words said – come and gone. They'd taken the weight out of the day, the attention abated, and now he was seated in the yellow light so familiar from the mill's city views, from a certain paint-smothered hand over his eyes, from evenings spent by the apartment window, measuring his breaths in time with Mike's as he fell asleep on the couch. Jean wasn't sure about a lot of things.

He was an observational drawer, in the sense that he drew his surroundings down and handed himself over to their chaos. The issue he'd yet to overcome was his inability to draw his surroundings into himself first before putting them to paper. So the outcomes became merged with memories and faces and thoughts that made him light up with this _need_ to draw, whether they were relevant to what he was supposed to be doing or not. He couldn't digest the day the same way Isabel seamlessly digested the clumps of bread she picked from her pocket. All he could gauge, observing the care workers smile, Marco to Petra as she danced into the room and he washed the dishes, and Eld and Gunther laughed at something Farlan passionately babbled about, all scowl free, no face alike to those dark and bored at the old house – he had to stop this, getting himself caught in a wind. The only thought Jean could put together clearly was that this place was different. All other thoughts ran around the table like children.

* * *

Yeah try to forget all them enemies and debts  
They'll just chase you round and give you sour dreams  
\- _Shakey Graves, 'Roll the Bones'_

* * *

A/N:

Grown Ocean - Fleet Foxes  
Roll the Bones - Shakey Graves  
Cruella - Bad Bad Hats  
Sisters Of The Moon - Fleetwood Mac  
I Know I'm Not Wrong - Fleetwood Mac  
Well You Wanna Know What? - Bratmobile  
Rhiannon - Fleetwood Mac  
Jorge Regula - The Moldy Peaches


End file.
